Ben and Bob’s SXSW Video Diary: Day 5

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Screen Shot 2016-03-18 at 3.00.08 pm.jpgClemenger BBDO Melbourne is at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Thirty thousand of the world’s early adopters and decision makers will gather to decide what new technology becomes part of our culture – and what doesn’t.

This year, Interactive Creative Director Ben Keenan and new head of CRM, Gayle While, will be joined by Sydney’s Head of Creative Technology Brendan ‘Bob’ Forster and colleagues from Colenso BBDO in Auckland for the five day festival.

This is the final daily wrap from the Clemenger team at SXSW. The Interactive Festival is winding up and Music Festival is starting to heat up – or as Bob put it: “The nerds are departing and the cool kids are coming in.”

Today Ben got to sit in on a session with Kevin Kelly, who is a futurist and one of the founders of Wired magazine. His session focused on the internet of ‘information’ making a transition to the internet of ‘experiences’. He was talking about people immersing other people in their local environments by sharing content in real time. 

Bob went to two very topical sessions today, the first being “How to fight ISIS (without breaking the Internet)”. A young Muslim boy from the UK was crafting anti-ISIS sentiments in videos, which were really resonating with young Muslims unhappy about the terrorist group. The Government caught wind of this, it got picked it up in the press and the boy was portrayed as the poster boy for fighting ISIS on the home front. Suddenly, his message completely lost all its value and impact for its target audience. There’s a big lesson for brands here in letting organic reach grow first and claiming credit later.

The second session Bob saw was one on Smarter Cities, specifically how New York and San Francisco are designing their infrastructure around being more connected to the web and to the people. There was a fantastic demonstration of how cultural movements, people and data all came together in New York. A brand partnered with Spotify to create playlists specific to each borough of the city. Then David Bowie died. The night before his death, each neighborhood had vastly different user-generated playlists. On the day of his death, they all changed to a David Bowie playlist. This showed that no matter how diverse a city can be there are certain things that bring people together. 

 

At the Trade Show, we found an app that can tell you your net worth in real time, learned about a product which lets you bring all your Internet of Things ideas to life at home, and discovered that the integrated espresso machine is no longer the gadget to have in your kitchen – you need an open sourced home brew machine.

You can see all the Clemenger BBDO Team’s videos from the Festival on their YouTube channel.