Super-additivity: A modern approach to marketing
Recapping SXSW 2025 and the festival's role in driving creativity and unexpected collaboration.
There is an old saying in marketing that goes, “you can’t market to everyone.”
And it makes sense, especially in a data-driven world, where targeting and programmatic media buying rule the day, and downward pressure on budgets push executive leaders to pick the kinds of tactics that can prove a meaty return-on-investment (“quickly” being the preferred timeline).
Still, when I teach undergraduates marketing, one lesson I try to impart is this:
Always remember why you got into marketing in the first place.
For most of us, it wasn’t “data,” and it wasn’t “developing synergies through technology and infrastructure to target the right customers at the right point in the buying cycle.”
It was to tell stories, to build epic brands, and make work with a lasting impact.
Put differently, great marketing moves people. It compels them to purchase a product because it adds value to their life: either in utility, or entertainment, or convenience.
In a post-pandemic world, I have found that one of the best strategies is to broaden the scope of our approach as marketers. In this modern Renaissance, that is, the best brands are finding ways to market to everyone, then convert the right ones.
Events offer an enormous opportunity for this kind of strategy to come to life, and over the past couple of years I’ve really enjoyed activating at SXSW. Now, put aside the debate about the sponsorships, and the programming, and the overly-commercialized nature of the event, and focus instead on the people there.
Film, television, comedy, music, creativity, tech, all intermingling and sharing ideas and inspiration for two weeks in Austin. I can codify the moment I was sold, last year, after an activation we hosted, our team and some clients went out to an old Austin country music bar where there was line-dancing. My colleague Kadley and I were standing by the dance-floor when a proper cowboy approached and asked her to dance. Off they went, spinning around to the live band playing nearby. After a few minutes, they circled back and the cowboy leaned in to me and said excitedly, “you all make fonts?! I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
SOLD.
Market to everyone. Convert the right ones.
SXSW: Craft & community coming together.
Last week, we returned to Austin with new activation led by COLLINS, one of our wonderful agency partners. My approach to partnerships has always been pretty simple: pick the right partners, and then get out of their way.
Few companies understand the creative landscape like COLLINS does, and so in December, I met with two of their brilliant creative minds, Alex Athanasiou and Eron Lutterman, at a diner in Brooklyn, and over soup (we all got soup) we conceived something that would not just tell a great story at SXSW, but create an ecosystem where new, great stories could be made.
Enter "Americana First," a curated event featuring creative voices from Yellowstone (the tv show, not the park!), Tecovas, NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration and more. Norm Clasen, the photographer behind the original Marlboro Man campaign, shared his career journey and the makings of an incredible (albeit controversial) brand story.
We took over the iconic Arlyn Studios — the recording home used by Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, Miranda Lambert, and so many more. A place that holds such a creative gravitas, it was the perfect venue to bring together interdisciplinary leaders for collaboration and conversations.
Why Arlyn Studios? Last year, at a panel with Canva, Pantone, and Getty Images, the question was posed, “who is missing from this stage?” Sound was the answer. And so we took it a step further, bringing our friends from Audiosocket to the event and launching a collaboration called “FONIC,” a music and type discovery tool for creatives powered by AI.
Super-additivity & place-making.
“Arts-based place-making” is a concept often reserved for municipalities, who will designate areas for artists to cohabitate, offering lodging and support in exchange for their art and local teaching to help revitalize the area. But it is also a concept that I believe is happening across industries in our modern Renaissance.
People are seeking one another, they’re craving an ability to express all parts of their creative identities, and they’re shedding the more traditional ways of working. Outside of the presentations and on-stage discussions, my favorite part of our event was seeing people build new connections. I am really excited to see where some of them lead.
Adults who wanted to be astronauts when they were young chatting with the Creative Director of NASA. Marketing leaders who moonlight as bass players exchanging information with one of the band members.
Did any contracts get signed on this day? Not that I know of. But a tremendous amount of energy and excitement was built.
Throughout my career, I’ve always known how important initiatives like this are to driving marketing effectiveness, but admittedly, it is super challenging to attribute or to build a framework around.
And so it was a true “a-ha” moment when my colleague Rick and I had breakfast with Steve Keller, Sonic Strategy Director the next morning, and shared career stories and ideas. Steve is a musician turned academic turned consultant, all wrapped up in one.
He called this kind of motion: Super-additivity, that is, a magic that brings sometimes unexpected people and connections together and nurtures them in surprising ways. Once I heard the term, I couldn’t unhear it. Later, another person referred to the idea of “quorum sensing,” a “cell–to-cell communication process that enables bacteria to obtain information about cell density and species composition of the vicinal community and adjust their gene expression profiles accordingly.”
That’s a bit too scientific for me, but the way it was described in layman’s terms was, plants with different genetic profiles, when put close together, can find ways to support one another’s growth and longevity.
However you’d like to describe it, events like SXSW have a way of compelling growth, pushing people together who otherwise would never have met.
On another night, I was invited by my friend Lisa Gralnek with my colleague Charles to a curated dinner she was co-hosting at the home of a lovely person named Nancy Giordano, co-founder of Play Big Inc.
Amongst the ~50 other guests, a perfect encapsulation of quorum sensing. There were traveling musicians who go city-to-city couch-hopping and playing for private events. There was a former lead animator for a large entertainment company that drew some of the most beloved animated films of a generation. There was a young artist who collected over 100,000 cicadas last year in Chicago and is using them to create brilliant canvas art, some of which was on display.
Designers, writers, artists, civic leaders, none who had immediate connections or opportunities to collaborate, but all who left feeling deeply inspired to figure out how to do so anyway.
If you were able to join us at Arlyn Studios, I really am grateful that you chose to spend time in such a busy place to hang with us. And if you didn’t, keep your eyes out at other creative events big and small, because I am sure Monotype will be showing up with friends like COLLINS in more places, centering design and innovation wherever we can in this modern Renaissance.
Where do you find “super-additivity” happening in your work? How can you lean more into unexpected relationships and value creation in the industry you serve?