HGTV Lodge

Nashville, TN · Glendale, AZ · 2012–2019 · HGTV — Agency: Pop2Life

A seven-year argument for owning the asset instead of renting the moment.

Night view of a rustic wooden buildings with string lights, small trees in planters, and a modern stadium in the background at CenturyLink Field in Seattle.

What Seven Years of the HGTV Lodge Taught Me About Built Equity

CMA Fest is the most concentrated week of country music fans on earth. Eighty thousand people a day. Every brand in the category competing for the same attention.

The standard play is to rent. A storefront, a club, a tent on a parking lot — somebody else's structure dressed up in your logo for four days, then handed back the next week looking like nothing happened there. Most brands at CMA Fest were doing some version of that.

We pitched HGTV the opposite. Don't rent. Build. Own the asset. And — given that HGTV is a network about people building things — let the build itself become content.

So we built a lodge.

Cedar and steel. A killer front porch and lawn. Second-story loft. Ceiling fans. A built-in stage. The kind of place you'd rent in the mountains for a long weekend with the people you love. Modular enough to ship and re-erect, durable enough to hold up in the field for years, unmistakable enough that it would still look like itself in year five.

The capex was paid in year one. Every year after, HGTV was paying for programming and operations against an asset they already owned. That freed the budget for the things that actually drove affinity. A-level country artists. Radio promotion fly-aways. Talent integrations. Morning coffee on the porch. Cocktails for VIPs at happy hour. A daily rhythm that made the Lodge feel like a destination inside the festival.

By year two, fans were asking for the Lodge schedule before they asked for the festival schedule. By year three, artists were asking to play it — an intimate, well-run venue with sound that mattered to people who play music for a living. By year four, we installed an LED wall outside so the fans who couldn't get in could gather in the parking lot and watch the stage. The overflow had become its own audience.

Then it traveled.

In January 2015, we rebuilt the Lodge in Glendale, Arizona as a named stage at the DirecTV Super Fan Festival for Super Bowl XLIX. The Property Brothers emceed. FOX Sports 1 broadcast live all week. The asset built for a country music festival was now a brand-name venue at the biggest sports event in America.

That's what owning the thing gets you. A rented tent doesn't travel. A rented tent doesn't show up in Glendale. A rented tent has to be re-rented, re-branded, re-built every time the brand wants to show up somewhere — and the recognition resets to zero with each new structure.

The Lodge didn't reset.

This is what we mean by Built Equity at the level of the physical asset. The capex was paid once. The recognition compounded for seven summers at CMA Fest and traveled to the Super Bowl in between. By year seven, the Lodge wasn't a thing HGTV was doing at CMA Fest. It was the most sought-after side stage at CMA Fest.

Interior of a rustic wooden event space with hanging pendant lights, a second-floor balcony, and people socializing.
Interior of a rustic wooden event space with hanging pendant lights, a second-floor balcony, and people socializing.
Interior of a rustic wooden venue with a stage, hanging Edison bulbs, and brick walls. The room has leather furniture, a staircase, and a projection of the HGTV logo on the wall.
Interior of a rustic wooden venue with a stage, hanging Edison bulbs, and brick walls. The room has leather furniture, a staircase, and a projection of the HGTV logo on the wall.
Night outdoor concert with large crowd, stages, and colorful lights, advertising Property Brothers on a billboard.
Night outdoor concert with large crowd, stages, and colorful lights, advertising Property Brothers on a billboard.