Woodstock versus the Super Bowl

The first Woodstock festival had 400,000 attendees. Last year’s Super Bowl had 112 million viewers in the United States alone.

To me, the ideal project is to create content for Woodstock rather than the Super Bowl.

That point of view approaches blasphemy as a marketer. With the Super Bowl, the reach is historic, the engagement exponential.

But in a setting attempting to reach everyone, who is the content actually for? How progressive can it really be, and what can I, as a marketer, learn from it? And perhaps most importantly, how long will people really remember it for?

Woodstock’s audience is a fraction of the Super Bowl’s. But the creative and the audience-building opportunities, I’d argue, are better.

Unlike the Super Bowl, attendees aren’t seen as a treasure trove of various markets in one place — they’re a community of like-minded people with similar passions. The setting isn’t overmanaged and clinical — it’s organic. The content wouldn’t be for internal agendas — it would be for the audience. And the cultural imprint wouldn’t be a temporary trending topic on social — but rather a long-term movement built from the long tail.

Maybe if I were given the chance at a Super Bowl-like stage, I’d change my mind and abandon my idealism. But I’d have to keep in mind that few remember uncontroversial Super Bowls, whereas most adults across the globe can recall what Woodstock was about and how it changed their life.