Crosscut Festival & Brandlive: Bringing Big Celebrities and Bold Thinking to Hybrid Audiences

• The Challenge: Crosscut pivoted from a 3-day to a 5-day hybrid event, with over 50 high-profile and celebrity speakers – and more live presentations than originally anticipated.
• The Solution: Brandlive worked in tandem with the Crosscut team to create a fully-branded, custom hybrid experience so that Crosscut’s starpower and content could shine.
• The Impact: Through fireside interviews, panelists and special events, Crosscut created powerful moments with engaging speakers, shedding a light on some of the most important issues of our time. And by opting to use a hybrid event format, Crosscut reached over 300 more attendees than the previous year.

Encouraging Conscious Change with an Increased Hybrid Audience

Seattle’s PBS affiliate, KCTS 9 – in partnership with Crosscut – provides independent, local journalism to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest with in-depth coverage of the area’s biggest issues. In addition to providing exceptional daily content on their website, Crosscut holds an annual festival bringing together the biggest ideas and boldest thinkers. The Crosscut Festival gathers together the community of the curious, connecting noteworthy political leaders, newsmakers, and experts to speak on current matters affecting the community locally and globally. 

Brandlive has been providing extraordinary services for Crosscut Festival since their switch to a hybrid format in October 2020. And despite being able to go back to fully in-person events, in 2022 the Crosscut Festival returned in a hybrid format – featuring an in-person keynote and streaming online events – to reach a much wider audience, giving event planners ample content that would provide impact in real time as well as in future marketing efforts. Speakers like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Matt Damon joined Crosscut to speak on issues around politics, social justice, the economy, the environment, innovation and more. Using the Brandlive platform also meant that Crosscut was able to record each presenter separately, which was ideal for their intentions of repurposing their content well after the event ended.

Creating and Seamlessly Streaming a Collection of Impactful Content

Originally a 3-day event, Crosscut Festival quickly shifted into a 5-day experience. Along with the additional two days, many of the segments – previously expected to be pre-recorded – needed to be presented live due to the unpredictable schedules of some of the A-list speakers. 

Brandlive’s expert tech and services were able to help Crosscut seamlessly shift their event to something bigger than they previously thought possible, all while maintaining a completely branded experience for their hybrid audience. And with such high-profile speakers on their roster presenting live, Crosscut knew that having a stable, reliable streaming service was a non-negotiable. Additionally, having the right tech platform to plan their run of show in advance – even with the live speakers – made the day-of show that much smoother; all the celebs had to do was show up.

The folks at Crosscut also knew they wanted to have control over their branding. From the registration page to the shows themselves, being able to build and customize the pages was of the utmost importance. They also needed to factor in accessibility, ensuring that every attendee would be able to catch all of the content without missing a thing. And with Brandlive’s intuitive customizable features, it wasn’t a problem.

Making The Most of Shareable, Meaningful Moments

With so many live speakers presenting simultaneously, Crosscut had their concerns about everything running without a hitch. But with the Brandlive team in the background and the prep they’d done to ensure success, Crosscut Festival led a 5-day broadcast without any hiccups.

Outside of the initial success of the festival, Crosscut is continuing to find new ways to continue sharing their impactful content. By making the most of Brandlive’s platform, they’re able to reuse the content recorded from the Crosscut Festival. This opportunity to share their exceptional speakers more broadly with other audiences furthers their reach, all in an effort to make this world a better, more equitable place.

Event Coordination Made Easy

Using Brandlive as Crosscut’s trusted tech platform was just the beginning of an incredible collaboration. Aside from being helpful, patient, and kind during extra special shows, Brandlive values empowering their clients to take control of their events. Outside of the big annual festival, Crosscut knew they wanted to self-produce smaller events over the course of the year as Brandlive stood alongside them in support – something that other competitors simply don’t offer.