innovative meetings Jennifer N. Dienst South by Southeast
Charleston, S.C., and the rest of the southeastern United States have a booming digital and creative economy — big enough to support DIG SOUTH, a new SXSW-style interactive festival.
“F
rom the very beginning, our goal was to be the Southeast’s interac- tive festival,” Stanfield Gray said,
sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Charleston, S.C., a month after he launched DIG SOUTH. The conference and expo, focused on the Southeast’s burgeoning digital, creative, and tech- nology industries, was held at the Col- lege of Charleston TD Arena on April 12–14. “South by Southwest is in Austin, which is a long way from here,” Gray said, “and then there are other festivals that are very specific — one is all about coding, mobile, or blogging — but there didn’t seem to be a big, broad festival in the Southeast that mixed content creative with platform creative.” Gray had been thinking about DIG
SOUTH for a while. But he kicked his plan into high gear two years ago, when a medical scare — a benign tumor — delivered a “wake-up call.” Not long after, he attended the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York City. “I was inspired by the presenters from Foursquare, Virgin Atlantic, HuffPost, Coca-Cola, and Twitter,” said Gray, who today is director of strategic communi- cations at the College of Charleston and music editor for Charleston magazine.
“But what I realized was, I didn’t think anybody I met there was necessarily smarter or had more vision than the people I knew in Charleston and the Southeast. They just had more access to capital and lived in urban environ- ments where they had more talent to draw from to build their companies.” Charleston and the surrounding
Southeastern region have been gaining traction as a hub for digital innova- tion for some time now. In 2011, Fast
PCMA.ORG Company spotlighted the city as
“Silicon Harbor,” and in recent years, companies like Amazon’s CreateSpace, Twitter, and Google have opened offices there. Lesser-known tech companies like PeopleMatter, BenefitFocus, and Blackbaud also call the city home. Even with that homegrown infra-
structure to draw on, Gray’s plan to create a Southeastern version of SXSW wasn’t without risks. Not only did he and his wife, Sunny, fund the entire for- profit venture themselves, but the festi- val’s theme — an umbrella of all things digital, all things creative, and how they overlap — was by no means a sure thing.
“It made it difficult to sell the first year,” Gray said. “I had to take a huge leap of faith to pull off DIG SOUTH. I have a high degree of risk tolerance and the spirit that you only live once, so why not dive into the deep end?”
‘FOR ME, THAT WAS SYMBOLIC’ But as Gray reached out for support and input, building a large advisory committee of experts like Rob Savoy, national contracts manager for festival productions with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival; Baron Jordan, global IT leader for the Coca-Cola Com- pany; and Ernest Andrade, executive director of Charleston Digital Corridor, he found a community ready and eager to support DIG SOUTH. Gray’s vision of bringing together all aspects of the industry resonated with startups and veteran organizations like CNN, Face- book, and Twitter, all of which were represented at this year’s festival. To keep its young, on-the-brink
audience engaged, Gray crafted an edu- cational conference that went beyond
JULY 2013 PCMA CONVENE 35
ON THE WEB
For more information about DIG SOUTH, visit
digsouth.com.
Innovative Meetings is sponsored by the Irving Convention & Visitors Bureau,
irvingtexas.com.
ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP
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