SXSW 2023 Day 5: Brand Science
Last recap daily for SXSW 2023 with a couple of great sessions on marketing and pretty pictures from space! Today was all about brand science, the future of marketing and advertising.
Director Innovation Mediaplus International
Last recap daily for SXSW 2023 with a couple of great sessions on marketing and pretty pictures from space! Today was all about brand science, the future of marketing and advertising.
When dealing with innovation – and that word gets thrown around a lot at conferences like SXSW – you need a certain level of resilience towards frustration. Most people, when being confronted with something new, tend to be dismissed about it. Most innovations don’t have immediate world-changing effects. Nor personal relevance for everybody. And often they are hard to grasp and easily dismissed.
One particularly enjoyable aspect of SXSW conference is the immense diversity of topics covered in its program. Technology, business, marketing, design, entertainment, healthcare, politics, psychedelic drugs – there’s a lot of everything. Things get even more enjoyable, when you realize that despite the often fundamentally different backgrounds of speakers and industries, certain challenges are the same.
Duality is a major theme at SXSW, down to its programming, speakers and organisation. Tech and business meet entertainment and arts: A-List celebrities and highly specialized niche experts.
Country music is deeply connected to the city of Austin, Texas. And no genre of music does better short form storytelling than country. Love, heartbreak, loss. It’s more than fitting, that one of the major themes of SXSW 2023’s first day was storytelling.
DLD can certainly make your head spin. There are only few conferences out there that manage to pack as many high-class speakers and experts from very diverse fields into a tight schedule of 20 to 30 minute sessions and make it work. Somehow. Covering topics from robotics and the industrial metaverse to the latest developments in neuroscience to the opportunities of generative AI for businesses in an hour is a bold move.
The video game industry is posting record-breaking revenues year after year and attracts players across all demographics on every device, from dedicated gaming consoles to personal computers and smartphones.
The central theme of SXSW has always been change: it’s about transforming itself from its humble beginnings as a music festival in the capital of Texas into one of the world’s leading conferences on technology, marketing and innovation, and about the change of the city of Austin itself. And Austin is changing rapidly, which becomes more and more obvious the more often you return.
Augmented reality has been one of the great innovation topics of the technology industry for years now. The sector is currently focusing primarily on smartphone cameras, which allow users to project a digital content layer onto their environment. But augmented reality moves more and more from smartphones to other wearables into augmented audio.
From a marketing perspective, fragmented consumer use of media means that there are now an unmanageable number of touchpoints in the consumer journey. This development has been exacerbated by the long-standing trend towards maximum personalisation of consumers’ life plans, with high demand for products and services that are personally relevant. “One size fits all” has long been a thing of the past.