Everyone loves the idea of South by Southwest (SXSW). What started as a music festival in Austin, Texas in 1987 and has grown to include film, TV, video games and technology, attracts some 300,000 people every year. It’s where new musicians and startups (like Twitter in the first full-blown SXSW events) go to attract the attention of consumers, media, funders and celebrities. For the creative industries, it’s the ultimate mix of business and pleasure.
Organisers describe the nine-day collection of conferences, concerts, theatre, award ceremonies, tech competitons and parties as the convergence of tech, film and television, music, education and culture. Europeans might find it easier to visualise a joyous, sprawling, fill-the-town combination of the Edinburgh Festival (performing arts), Cannes Lions (marketing), Mipcom (TV, film) and the Cannes Film Festival. SXSW has revenue of some $400mn and expanded to Sydney in 2023 and is opening up in London in 2025. Festivals are hot.
In recent years, all kinds of B2B events have called themselves festivals, although most are really “just” traditional trade shows. But the essence of SXSW and many of the events held, for example in Cannes, is the way they blend real business events with entertainment and fun. In a world of ESG vigilance, that may be easier said than done. It’s all about genuinely high-value business information, education and networking, spliced with “relevant” fun, excitement and the ability to socialise with industry peers. Such events become compelling for business and also prosumer audiences because they’re at least as experiential as transactional. Needless to say, it also helps to captivate the senior executives and policymakers who tire of crowded exhibition halls.
Those are all the reasons why Cannes Lions really does justify its newish brand, “The International Festival of Creativity”.
It’s also why, in making its £1.2bn recommended bid for Lions owner Ascential, Informa said the acquired business would become the centrepiece of a new business, Informa Festivals, “designed to showcase the value of experience-led, festival brands – a fast growing area in the B2B events space”. It hopes to use the Cannes Lions expertise to “accelerate the broader, experience-led transformation” of its wider B2B portfolio.
It is slightly ironic that much of Informa’s previous experience with “festivals” has been in the Informa Tech division (where it has Tech Festivals in Cape Town and Singapore) which it is currently de-merging into the listed TechTarget. But it also organises the Monaco Yacht Show and the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.
The spotlight on “experiential” events will also motivate Informa’s peers. They could do worse than study the progress of one of its former executives. New Yorker Matt Middleton spent almost 10 years involved in the sales and management of B2B finance brands for Informa before launching his own Boston-based startup in 2021. He raised $1.8mn of venture funds for his Advisor Circle company (now FutureProof) in order to create “new-generation events, marketing and communications activity for executives in wealth management”. Within two years, he had had sold his c$6mn-revenue Exchange ETF (exchange-traded fund) conference to private equity for an estimated $20-25mn.
He’s now concentrating on the FutureProof Festival, launched in 2022, which claims to be “the world’s largest wealth festival”. It was designed to exploit the changes in tech and investor behavior in wealth management. But Middleton and his co-founders reckoned that existing events were “too stuffy, too boring, not diverse enough, and too much pay-for-play”. Thus was born the idea of an outdoor festival combining culture, wealth, finance, tech and the creative arts.
The third edition of the four-day festival takes place next month at Huntingdon Beach, California. It happens alongside the beach and dominates the downtown area and multiple hotels, with 100 speakers and an expected 4,500+ attendees. Most attendees will be financial advisors and wealth management executives, hosted (and paid for) by sponsors who also host meetings, dinners and other festival events. That 2024 attendance forecast is up from 2,700 last year and 1,600 in 2022. Middleton says: “Last year, we introduced a meetings program. We facilitated 17,000 meetings. We’re on pace now to facilitate over 30,000 meetings this time around.”
There are, of course, plenty of professional, structured conferences and networking sessions but – consistent with Middleton’s ambition to make the event “an SXSW for financial advisors” – there’s also music festivals, parties and workouts for the body and mind. Everything (except the evening dinners) takes place along half a mile of beach from 8am to 6pm each day. It’s, deliberately, a long way from transactional events in convention centres. It seems to reinforce the point (also made by the rapid post-pandemic, bounce-back of live events) that personal relationships are vital and – unlike data and “content” – depend on getting out of the office and spending quality time with people. You can see why so many B2B people are starting to see the potential value of festivals as unmissable events and as “influencers”.
FutureProof Festival’s revenue this year is expected to be $11mn, up from $7mn in 2023. A further $2mn revenue will come from its new FutureProof Retreat in Colorado Springs, in the mountains, attended by 550 people with more than 100 sponsors. The result is that the Future Proof company is expected to make a 20% EBITDA margin in 2024, even while investing in a new launch for the second consecutive year.
The retreat format (indoor and outdoor) divides between “traditional” content sessions, one2one networking and group leisure and personal activities. Middleton considers it to be highly scalable because it could be segmented by asset class, job function, industry need or gender: “You could do so many different things without really saturating your market or your audience and really serving the needs of the folks building the businesses.”
But the founder believes his biggest brand will be Citywide, taking place in Miami Beach, Florida in March 2025: ” It’s very much like the South by Southwest model where we have this hub, the outdoor footprint, literally on South Beach.”
Matt Middleton aims to build a large portfolio of events for the US wealth management industry. The emerging pattern of smaller, exclusive events to complement one or two major industry festivals may prompt thoughts among operators in other markets. You can also connect the thinking to that which is fuelling the growth of business networks across industry sectors and/or job categories including CEOs and functional heads like procurement, HR, IT and finance. And you could think laterally about how the FutureProof approach could take event organisers into high-value executive training. Specialist consulting is also just a conversation away.
It all confirms the growing case for ‘narrow but deep’ specialisation in B2B media and events and – lest we forget – for more cloning of the style of Cannes Lions and SXSW.
It also shows how the development of what might, at first glance, seem like frothy festivals opens up the possibility of yet deeper immersion in many B2B verticals. There’s serious business behind the fun. Who said the pandemic wouldn’t change events?
