(Full Disclosure – I’ll be at SXSW as part of the Chevrolet SXSW Team.  Chevrolet is an official sponsor this year of SXSW.)

Wow.  I have been buried in work, specifically gearing up for SXSW – the premier interactive, film and music festival in the nation.  Yes, I am a little partial because I’m from Austin (where it’s held) but anyone who’s anyone, particularly in the interactive world, attends.  With its heavy technology focus, “trends” tend to appear here before they go mainstream.

We have spent the last few months planning a huge integrated program for one of our clients, Chevy.  And honestly, I couldn’t be more proud of everything we’ve done and are doing.  Chevy has been great to work with and it is our expectation that we will enhance the SXSW experience for everyone.  I won’t get much into all of our program right now, but suffice it to say, we have developed a heavy social + mobile + OOH program.  Here, it’s the OOH program that I really want to focus on.

Yesterday, 8 teams of roadtrippers from across the nation (influential SM-types) set off, all in Chevy vehicles, en route to Austin, where they will all arrive on Thursday 3/11.  Along the way, they are accomplishing “tasks” (which have been crowdsourced over the past month) and broadcasting them across the world wide web.  In addition, they’re receiving clues that lead them from destination to destination. (It’s like the Amazing Race 2.0.)  This is where we’ve introduced one of the OOH components.  We’ve made postcards with QR Codes and MS Tags that have been/are being delivered to the teams’ various hotels.  When they check-in at their hotels, they receive a package that contains these postcards, and when they interact with the postcards, they receive their next clue. Each team gets 1 QR Code postcard (that leads them to a Twitter account) and 1 MS Tag postcard (that generates an SMS).

Since this is such a technology-rich conference, we really wanted to introduce these roadtrippers to different types of emerging technologies (they also receive a clue via “checking in” with Gowalla) before they arrived in Austin.  We felt that it was the perfect way to set the stage for everything that they will experience in the days to come.

One of our QR Code post cards: 

One of our MS Tag post cards:

More to come as we get closer to SXSW.  If you’re interested, follow all of the action, from Chevy’s perspective here.