Ankush Gupta (0:14) Hi, I’m Ankush. I’m the founder of Eventible.com and the host at Building Awesome Events, a podcast for event marketers. And I’ve been waiting to say this for a while now, our next guest needs no introduction.

Hugh Forrest is the Chief Programming Officer at South by Southwest, an annual conglomerate of film interactive media music festivals and conferences that takes place in Mid-March in Austin, Texas, drawing over a quarter of a million attendees. Welcome to the show Hugh, a real pleasure to have you with us today. 

Hugh Forrest (0:43) Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here today. Big honor, excited to talk about some of the stuff, things we’ve done well and things that we can improve on. 

Ankush Gupta (0:52) I normally send out a few questions to our guests before the show and seeing as long as you’ve spent doing this. I sort of consciously didn’t want to send those questions out to you. I said, okay, Hugh’s probably heard it all. There’s no way that he needs to see a bunch of questions around what he’s been up to. Let’s get started.

You’ve been described as a force of nature, a workhorse, a supporter of innovation and entrepreneurship, and one of Austin’s greatest assets. Tell me how did you get here? What got you to start SXSW 35 years back?

Hugh Forrest (1:23) Well, I came on board, South by Southwest started in 1987. I was the first paid employee and I came on board in 1989. At that point, it was a relatively small event that was entirely focused on music. I certainly had no idea or no conception that we would be lucky enough to grow and evolve and change as much as we have over the last 35 years.

I came on board way back in 1990, simply because it was a better opportunity than whatever job I had at the time. And, you know, the event industry in many ways was much different, much smaller, much less sophisticated. 35 years ago, I think that was a big advantage in terms of our growth that unlike where we were in 2025, all of our flaws were not immediately broadcast on YouTube or TikTok or threads or whatever.

Ankush Gupta (2:22) Or on Eventible for that matter.

Hugh Forrest (0:25) Or printed on Eventible. Yes, exactly. But I mean, our general formula for success is trying to grow a little bit every year, grow organically, improve a little bit every year, take a long term approach to this, that it’s going to take a while to get where we want to go and be very willing to and aggressive in evolving and changing and transitioning and pivoting when we need to, to match the needs and demands and appetite of the of the community.

Ankush Gupta (2:55) Yeah, absolutely, Hugh. I mean, that’s great. It sounds like a real rock star journey, over so long.

But you tell me, you’ve had your ear to the ground for a long time now. What’s your process to curate these topics of interest? For example, in the upcoming edition, I saw that we have the usual AI and tracks about the creator economy. But I love the track called 2050, which, as it says, is about big picture thinking. How did that come about? And how does it all really come about for you? So what’s the process to bring so many disparate things together?

Hugh Forrest (3:26) Well, over the last roughly 15 years, we have really embraced the UGC idea, user generated content, where we rely on the community to provide about 70% of our total content that comes in via interface that we developed called the PanelPicker and the basic impetus here, the idea here is that the community understands specific, has expertise and understands specific industries better than we do.

What we understand is generally how to produce an event. So let us do what we do well and turn over to the community the things that they do well. In terms of the 2050 track, the concept there was trying to, as you say, have something that’s big picture, long range thinking. And that is somewhat opposed to, I think, how most of us live our day-to-day lives, which is thinking about the next five minutes, next hour, next day. And on a lot of different levels, if we’re going to continue to see this planet survive and thrive, we’ve got to try to be more long term and big picture in our scope. And that 2050 track does a lot of that.

Ankush Gupta (4:33) That’s great. I love that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, that was so fresh.

Hugh, I can only imagine the whirlwind of activity at SXSW. Can you give us a glimpse into your daily routine? How do you sort of juggle all the moving parts and ensure everything runs so smoothly?

Hugh Forrest (4:46) It often doesn’t run smoothly, but if we have you in the Eventible audience relatively fooled, then that’s a good thing.

You know, in the lead up to the event, and roughly we have a eight or nine month lead up. We’re trying to be as responsive as possible to our audience, to our community. That means answering emails, answering whatever other kind of conversations we have. I am strongly of this belief that came out of a book called ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ that was published roughly 20 years ago and that belief, that saying is, markets are conversations. So the more we can communicate with our audience leading up to the event, the better. That sounds relatively easy, but, we get a lot of communication.

So I spend a lot of time, typically early in the morning, responding to emails, encouraging my staff to be as responsive as possible. And I think that sets the tone of our respect for our audience. That’s the tone that the importance of communication.

On site, we are trying to have as much bandwidth to respond to problems when they happen. We all know that events often have something that happens that is unplanned,and that’s part of the ballgame. But, the issue isn’t the problem that happens, it’s how you react and deal and solve the problem.

So hopefully we’ve got enough bandwidth, enough training, enough attention to customer service to respond to those problems if and when they happen. And then I would say that another big piece of our particular equation for success is trying to communicate with as many people in the audience and the community post event to understand what they liked about the event, what they didn’t like about the event, how we can improve, how we can better serve their needs. So, again, I go back to that same McLuhan manifesto, markets are conversations.

And we certainly, you know, have more and more tools in 2024 and 2025 to communicate, converse with the audience than we did back in the late 80s when this thing started.

Ankush Gupta (6:49) Yeah, absolutely. At Eventible, which is a review platform and when attendees leave reviews for conferences, we allow the showrunners and the conference organizers to jump right in and respond to those reviews.

You’re also just giving credence to what you just said, that markets are conversations. So we’re trying to enable that actively as well. But Hugh, an interesting point you made talking about the build up to the event and you spoke about eight or nine months as a lead up time, providing customer service, talking to interested parties, answering queries.

Are you seeing that folks are now registering sort of later and later? So how does that really impact your mental health?

Hugh Forrest (7:26) Absolutely. That is certainly something that has changed post-pandemic, it’s changed with South by Southwest and I think it has changed across the event industry from what I understand. We see more people waiting until two months, a month before the event to make their decision.

For South by Southwest, in our particular situation, that also changed because 20 years ago,15 years ago, Austin did not have as many downtown hotel rooms as it has now. So people needed to buy a badge early to access the room block, the hotel room block that we manage. And so for 10 or 15 years, our biggest day of registration would always be the day that registration opened because people were buying badges and that typically opened early to mid-August.

That again has changed where more people waiting longer to make purchasing decisions. And I think that makes sense in the context of COVID. Is there going to be a spike of COVID? Is there going to be something else that disrupts our plan? And certainly, as you say, that makes adds one more level of stress to organizers of, well, we don’t quite have the numbers yet, but we’re we’re going to have a big last month before the event starts. So as always, the event world is full of challenges, right?

Ankush Gupta (8:59) Absolutely. And I never thought of it that way earlier, Hugh, in terms of room block being a contributing factor to making a last minute decision to attend. But, that seems just so much true. I mean, there’s so much choice out there. And if you can hold off making that decision, I suppose many would.

Hugh Forrest (9:16) Yeah, definitely. So, maybe if we do this interview again in three years or five years, that has changed. But I doubt it. I think a lot of these patterns that we adopted during the pandemic years are fully ingrained into our personalities or modes of business now. So I don’t know that that will change.

Ankush Gupta (9:36) Yeah, super interesting. Something to think about.

To a simpler question now, with your long tenure at SXSW, how do you keep the creative spark alive within your team and the event itself? And could you share a specific instance where you feel a new idea dramatically transformed part of the festival for the better?

Hugh Forrest (9:53) Great questions. I think, how do we keep the creative spark alive? It’s trying to remind myself and my staff how important this event is to our community. And I think that’s something that’s not unique to SXSW, it’s something for all event organizers, is when you have, when someone comes up to you during your event or emails you afterwards and says, “I had a great time” or “I met someone who helped my career” or “I met a new friend” or “This was the highlight of my year.” –That is dopamine.

That is what makes all the hard work possible and doable. And I get so much satisfaction out of that. And that’s really my motivation in terms of light bulb moments where we change things. I think one there was roughly a decade ago where we decided to, that we needed to, we weren’t doing enough to have meetups during the event. And so we dramatically expanded the amount of meetups. And I think that, I always thought, well, we don’t need to do that.

But the community can meet up on their own. But that’s difficult to do. And I also think that one of the ironies of bigger events like South by Southwest is that because it’s a bigger event, I get to go on your podcast and talk about things.

But our challenge as event organizers is to break that big event down into much smaller digestible components that people, that the attendees, that the community, that registrants can more easily absorb. And that’s where something like meetups or curated dinners come in where other, there are 50,000 people here, but that’s way too much for me to try to contemplate. But these 10 people that I’m meeting with now, wow, they’re all fascinating. And I’m going to learn a lot from them and create some new business connections.

So again, that light bulb moment was understanding that we need to, the growth is good and it’s neat to have a lot of people coming. But, in many ways, it’s completely at opposite ends of what you’re trying to accomplish with an event.

Ankush Gupta (12:05) Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. I think the bigger you are, the more you have to worry about personalizing these experiences for the folks who are coming in. Let’s talk a little bit more about Austin.

Austin’s unique vibe is such a big part of SXSW’s charm. With a festival attracting a global audience, how do you make sure that Austin’s local flavor not only fits in, but really shines through without getting overshadowed?

Hugh Forrest (12:27) Well, back at you. Certainly a big part of the success of SXSW is how fun, creative, unique, interesting, exciting a city Austin is. And particularly in March, where for our registrants that are coming in from other parts of the US, it can still be cold in Austin. Spring has already developed.

So the experience of Austin, of going to a neat restaurant, whether that’s barbecue or Tex-Mex or some other kind of food, certainly complements what people are doing. The fact that Austin has always been a very, very creative city goes hand in hand with what we celebrate most at SXSW, which is creativity. So again, it is the creativity of Austin.

The personality of Austin is one of the things that has helped SXSW grow. And I think Austin is unique. On the other hand, I think every place has a certain degree of creativity, of personality, of individuality that can be celebrated by the particular event. And I think that any place can do a compelling event as long as you really lean into your strengths and what makes that place unique and different than everywhere else.

Ankush Gupta (13:42) Absolutely. I don’t see anyone who can take on the baton from SXSW in terms of what it’s done for Austin. Taylor Swift, maybe? I don’t know what are your thoughts on that.

Hugh Forrest (13:54) Yeah, we would love to have Taylor Swift come and add to the creative.

Ankush Gupta (13:57) Yeah. Hugh, let’s talk about event marketing for a bit.

What are the channels you rely on the most to source interest and registrations for the many activities within SXSW? From music, film, marketing, tech, there are so many areas being represented. So I’m guessing the event marketing has to swivel around to be able to get in front of different audience segments. Give us an insight into how that happens and what are the skill sets and the way in which the team is organized to make this happen?

Hugh Forrest (14:24) Great question there. And I’ll say that certainly our approaches to event marketing have pivoted and changed and morphed and transitioned a lot over the last 35 years. 35 years ago, we did most of our marketing via newspapers. That was effective at the time. Certainly, it would be less effective now.

Part of the growth story of SXSW was being in the right place at the right time in the social media revolution in the early to mid 2000s. So, we have evolved to use a lot more social media. I think in 2024, we have many different approaches from a professional standpoint. I think what we find is most effective is LinkedIn being very aggressive there in terms of marketing the kind of content that is industry focused.

For the more consumer stuff we do, and particularly marketing of music, of bands that are playing SXSW, of films that are playing SXSW, of the comedy performers, we’re much more focused on TikTok or YouTube or Threads, whatever the social media channel that is getting the most traction. Also, of course, Instagram there. Again, it’s a multi-pronged approach, but I’ll go back to something we talked about a few minutes ago.

One of the things that we always find, and I think many other events and businesses will say this, is your community can market the event much better than you do. So when the community is writing something good about SXSW on Eventible or some other platform, that is absolutely gold. The community trusts the community more than they trust an event organizer.

So the more we can encourage and facilitate things like that, the more successful we can be in what we do and continue to grow our audience or our network or our community.

Ankush Gupta (16:18) That’s great. And is all of this mostly an internal effort or do you work with marketing agencies to facilitate some of these campaigns?

Hugh Forrest (16:26) It’s mostly internal. We have an internal brand team that produces most of our content and directs most of our strategy there. Certainly, again, those strategies have changed a lot over the last 10 to 15 years, and I think they will continue to change as audience tastes continue to change. One of the things that I’m excited about for the coming 2025 season is we’ll do more content that has more context about what to expect at an event like SXSW and the hope there or the idea there is to kind of broaden the funnel of people who understand what the event is.

The great thing about SXSW or one of the great things about SXSW is it has 500 different things that happen any single day. The horrible thing about SXSW is that 500 things that happen every single day, and it’s sometimes hard to market or communicate that. So again, we’ll embrace some new strategies for the 2025 season that will help us do that and stay tuned for more information there.

Ankush Gupta (17:26) Sounds good. Hugh, our final question for today revolves around social proof. This is something that we touched upon a little bit, and you know that at Eventible, we’re all about leveraging social proof to enhance event credibility and build event brands.

Specifically, in your experience with SXSW, how have you utilized social proof to not only attract more attendees but also to elevate the overall perception of the festival? You just mentioned a couple of minutes back how important it is to get people talking and to create that flywheel effect. But is this something that you’ve consciously been putting into practice or utilizing in some way?

Hugh Forrest (18:01) Absolutely. We have a robust social media team, and they are rebroadcasting, amplifying the positive things that we have on social media, and that’s very important.

As well, when I talked about the PanelPicker process and the idea of the user-generated content, part of the strategy there is that if you’re empowering and giving more authority or responsibility for users to create content at the event, to create panels, to create presentations, to create sessions, that they will aggressively market that stuff to their community. So again, people are always going to trust other people from their community, other users, reviews to get more information. We have certainly found that and have been lucky enough to have a lot of positive reviews over the years and leverage those, and those have been a huge, huge part of our growth.

Ankush Gupta (18:56) That sounds great. And thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show with us today. I know you have a lot to do, as always, so we’ll let you go. But thanks a lot, and we hope to see you soon.

Hugh Forrest (19:05) Great. Thank you so much. This has been a fun conversation, and keep doing the great stuff you’re doing with Eventible. Just echoing what I said in that last point, the more the community understands what is good about events and what can be rude about events, the better educated they can be in making their decisions, and the stronger it makes the event industry at large. So I’m a huge fan.

Ankush Gupta (19:29) Thanks, Hugh. Thank you so much.

Hugh Forrest (19:30) Thank you.