thinking of them as a relic of an era when Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were cute. This is something of a shame, since their portfolio now includes some interesting projects like Seed and Phoenix that might actually demonstrate a newfound capacity to innovate. On the other hand, few attendees were convinced that AOL’s current strategy of “buy popular blogs, try not to ruin them” will turn out to be anything substantive.
I do not envy the job of HP’s marketing agency, Porter Novelli. They had a tough assignment. Getting people excited about a company whose website is a decade behind the times is difficult, especially when the hot new product they bring to the table for a SXSW marketing push is e-printing. Not the new tablet debuting this summer, or their unlocked GSM Palm smartphone, but a service that is essentially a cloud version of network printing.
Still, the folks at PN put together a pretty respectable, and expensive, experiential marketing play with their HP Mobile Park, replete with retro trailers, astroturf and free booze. Not enough to put them on the winner side of the tally, however, especially when one also considers that HP bought space as a loading screen for the SXSWGO mobile app, but designed the screen so poorly that few understood who or what it was advertising.
The Remainder:
It’s difficult to say whether SCVNGR should chalk up SXSW 2011 as a win. On one hand, CEO Seth Priebatsch’s keynote speech was widely acclaimed, though not quite as much as Jane McGonigal’s talk. On the other hand, the flagship SCVNGR mobile app saw little traction amongst the attendees. Perhaps this doesn’t really matter to SCVNGR as much as their new daily deal app LevelUp.