What 14 days at SXSW actually looks like (route data)

SXSW is a logistics knife fight. Six trucks. Eight venue corridors. 14 days. Show schedules that change by the hour. The route plan we walked into Day 1 with was obsolete by Day 4.

What follows is the actual GPS data, lightly anonymized.

Daypart curves

By Day 3 it was clear: noon was dead. Audience didn't materialize on Rainey or 6th until 4 p.m., spiked around 8 p.m., and held until 1:30 a.m. We reallocated our four core trucks to a 4 p.m. – 2 a.m. window. Two units kept midday on the venue-drop circuit (where artists were arriving); the other four went silent until the rush.

Net effect: impressions per truck-hour up 38% vs. the original full-day plan. Cost per impression dropped accordingly.

The 2 a.m. re-route

Day 7 was a Saturday. Two of our trucks hit the East 6th corridor for the standard 8 p.m.–1 a.m. window. By 11 p.m., a major venue had relocated their show to a pop-up 1.2 miles north. The audience walked.

I called Joy at 1:47 a.m. We had three trucks within four blocks of the corridor that wasn't pulling weight. By 2:15, all three were on the new pop-up's approach routes.

Day 7 finished with the highest single-day impression count of the run. The original plan would have missed it entirely.

What the GPS told us

• Pre-show window (4–7 p.m.): high venue ingress, low engagement — moving trucks beat parked trucks 2:1
• Show window (8 p.m.–11 p.m.): trucks parked at known photo spots got 4× the social mentions of moving trucks
• Post-show (11 p.m.–2 a.m.): the gold zone — high engagement, high social, low competition

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Full route logs available for any client we work with. See methodology →