What We Learned From Sxsw

IAPI hosted a debrief on SXSW Interactive recently; SXSW is the pre-eminent emerging technology festival, where some of the most influential and inspiring people, from the world of tech and beyond, explore our increasingly tech-driven world.

Attracting the sharpest minds, the brightest innovators and the most exciting digital disrupters, SXSW is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity. From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, all taking place over five days, SXSW Interactive has become the place to discover the technology of tomorrow today 

Nigel Gwilliam, from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in London, attended the festival and gave the Dublin IAPI audience an overview of key trends.

The mood was sombre this year, at an event that is normally universally utopian. A big theme at this year’s event was the unforeseen consequences of technological change; Chinese and Russian cyber hacking, the rise of the alt-right, the influence of billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer, and the rise of fake news – many pointing out that fake news is nothing new and that the British tabloids have been at it for years!.

In his valedictory year in 2016, Obama spoke at SXSW Interactive. How much has changed since then, with Trump now in the White House? Events at SXSW also discussed the widely acknowledged idea that big data and micro-targeting on social media helped to win the election for Trump.

SXSW was all about artificial intelligence too this year. It is not news that increased automation leads to unemployment, with 3.5 million truck drivers in the US threatened by the move to driverless trucks, and predictions of the impact it will have in the legal and financial sectors. However, there is hope that new jobs will emerge – for instance, who knew that dog grooming or nail bars would become as big as they are now. There are products in the market already, such as https://persado.com/ and https://blackwoodseven.com/ that apply AI to marketing.

SXSW also featured Virtual Reality and the brand experience opportunities it offers. With 5G roaming coming down the line in three to five years, it will be a very fast two-way communication tool. When it comes to Augmented Reality, Snap has a patent for object recognition, while Chris Milk, a leading artist in this space, was recommended to see best in class VR art via his Within app.

CES, which took place in Vegas in January, showed how tech is being commercialised for the consumer. This year saw a lot of pet wearables (yes you read that right!), a smart hairbrush and Ford repositioning themselves as a mobility service provider. The trend is for brands to go from straight product, to smart product, to lifestyle service provider. The big winner at CES was Amazon’s Alexa, which is now available with Mattel’s Aristotle. With electronic personal assistants going mainstream, the big marketing challenge is how to market to them as opposed to individuals, as they will be the gatekeepers in the future. In a virtual assistant world, where do the ads go?