Dirt is Good SXSW

An interactive SXSW London installation where mess meets meaning

Client

Persil / OMO

Agency

Subvrsive

Role

Creative Director

Year

2025

Type

Experiential

Where mess meets meaning. For SXSW London, we built a multi-sensory installation around a simple, stubborn truth: play is essential to growth, and dirt really is good. Visitors made their own art out of colour, motion, and movement — tackling a football challenge in a motion-tracked LED zone, then watching Boston Dynamics' Spot robot spray that movement onto a shirt they took home.

Objective

To make 'Dirt Is Good' something you could feel, not just read — and hand SXSW London a show-stopper for its very first edition.

Challenge

A brand philosophy is an easy thing to print and a hard thing to prove. Persil wanted attendees to live the idea that mess and play matter — and it had to land as the flagship moment of a debut festival.

Solution

As Creative Director, I built an environment where getting it 'wrong' was the whole point: visitors made art out of movement. TOAST delivered it with Subvrsive, WPP Media, and Hogarth, pairing a motion-tracked LED zone with robotics to make an abstract idea tangible, joyful, and impossible not to share.

Execution

Take the football challenge inside the LED zone, and your movement became the artwork — captured live and sprayed onto a takeaway shirt by Spot, the robot dog. Personal, physical, and reliable enough to run all day in a live festival crowd.

Impact

We turned a brand line into a movement. As the centrepiece of SXSW London's first edition, it gave people a memorable expression of 'Dirt Is Good' — and a shirt that carried the idea out of the venue and onto the street.