HGTV Lodge

Nashville, TN · Glendale, AZ · 2012–2019 · HGTV

How a brand-owned hospitality lodge built once for CMA Fest became HGTV's most-traveled physical asset — and ended up a named stage at Super Bowl XLIX.

CMA Fest is the most concentrated week of country music fans on earth — 80,000 people a day, downtown Nashville, June heat, every brand in the category competing for the same attention. HGTV came to us with a question most networks were asking that year: how do we show up here without it feeling like another logo wrapped around a tent.

The easy answer was a year-by-year activation — design something, build it, strike it, do it again next year. That's the standard model and it's how most experiential budgets get spent. We argued for the opposite. Build it once. Own it. Treat the structure as a capital asset that pays back over multiple years instead of an expense that gets written off at load-out.

So we built a lodge. An actual lodge — wood interiors, deep porches, rocking chairs, ceiling fans, a stage built into the porch — designed to feel like the kind of place you'd rent in the mountains for a long weekend with the people you love. Not a tent dressed up in textures. A real piece of brand-owned hospitality architecture, modular enough to ship and re-erect, durable enough to hold up in the field for years.

The capex hit in year one. After that, the program economics got dramatically better. Year two onward, HGTV was paying for programming and operations against an asset they already owned — which freed budget for the things that actually drive affinity: artist bookings, songwriter rounds, talent integrations, the daily rhythm of coffee and lemonade and porch sits that made the lodge feel like a destination inside the festival rather than a brand presence at it. The thinking was an early version of what we now call The Built Equity: when a brand owns the physical fabric of an experience, every subsequent year compounds against the original investment instead of competing with it.

The lodge ran at CMA Fest for four consecutive years. By year two, fans were checking the lodge schedule before the festival schedule. By year three, artists were asking to play it. By year four, it had become a fixed point in the geography of the week.

Then it traveled.

In January 2015, the lodge was rebuilt in Glendale, Arizona, as a named stage at the DirecTV Super Fan Festival across from University of Phoenix Stadium for Super Bowl XLIX. Ten acts across three days — Thomas Rhett, Sam Hunt, Alesso, Jason Derulo, Becky G, Magic!, Young the Giant, Ingrid Michaelson, American Authors, The Cadillac Three — with HGTV's own Property Brothers emceeing and FOX Sports 1 broadcasting live from the grounds all week. The asset that was built for a country music festival in Nashville had become a brand-name venue at the biggest sports event in America.

That's what compounding looks like. Most brand activations are written off the day they're struck. The ones that aren't almost always look more like real estate than marketing.

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