The Agony & The Ecstasy at SXSW '23

FLASHBACK: 2013

All knowledge had become available at our fingertips. We would henceforth live in a true global village. Time and distance could no longer separate us. Freedom and higher consciousness would spontaneously break out across the planet. The “Facebook Revolution” in Cairo foretold a brighter future made possible by Web 2.0. The singularity was near. We would not just live longer, we would become immortal. We would not even need our bodies but would soon be able to upload our consciousness to the Cloud and commune with other minds liberated from their bodies.

JUMP CUT: 2023

We realized that everything that had ever achieved scale in social media was there to hook us, no matter the cost to our psyches. Facebook emerged as a tool used by tyrants to keep us distracted and submissive. Some brands dreamed of being tyrants in their own right, controlling the information to which we would be exposed to guide our every decision. Meanwhile, just before SXSW opened, the 15th?largest bank in the US, Silicon Valley Bank, defaulted on its customer’s deposits because it made the elementary mistake of betting on government bonds in high inflation. Named after the geography associated with “genius,” it revealed itself to be a Dumbo. So what is even the point? What great future is it that we hope to catch a glimpse of at Southby? What news will we bring home about the next big thing??

DARK HARBINGERS

“You used to search the Internet. Now the Internet is searching you. And it plans to take over your life.”

Futurist?Amy Webb?made her sixteenth annual trends report and warned us that we’re going to need a strong stomach to face it. “If the overlords of the Internet and Big Business have their way, we will be surrounded by information all the time – none of it what we want. The great AI-SMOSIS is coming. Is any data fair game? Who gets to decide? None of it is transparent. Everything your kids did on their computers while being home schooled during the pandemic has been hoovered by AI - including the music they played and the food they ate. When did we give them permission to do that? We agree to terms and conditions because otherwise we can’t get what we want. We’ve entered the Assistive Computing Era. You will never think on your own again.”

“De-risking and automating life have turning intimacy into a flat commercialized transaction.”

Therapy guru Esther Perel?warned that the way we soothe ourselves with our screens is de-humanizing us. It is atrophying the social muscles we need to have intimate relationships. Babies go into extreme stress if their mothers don’t react to them as demonstrated in Edward Tronick’s?still face experiment . We’re doing it to each other all the time with our screens. Like online dating. The goo-goo ga-ga phase when we’re flirting, then we’re ghosted. We collapse. We try to self-soothe. We may go through this with twenty people before we finally get to the first date. Now we’re looking for perfection. We’ve got a checklist. But true intimacy is a maelstrom of contradictory emotions. Many of us are living with heavy questions that don’t have yes/no answers. To make choices is to experience grief. These attempts to remove pain inconvenience and uncomfortableness make us less able to live in the “un-shiny.”

“Digital industrialism is stripping people of their dignity, skill and value.”

Media philosopher and social critic Douglas Rushkoff?asked why it is the Silicon Valley billionaires all have elaborate doomsday bunkers in Alaska and New Zealand. He began to realize that the bunker wasn’t really about their fear of the Apocalypse. It’s about their desire to live above and beyond all other humans. To be untouchable inside a perfect synthetic womb that attends to all their needs. These people are fundamentally opposed to what the early Web was all about – psychedelic, transportive, liberating, free. No, these people can only tolerate the abstract. From trading to stock market to synthetics, they aren’t happy until they are completely removed from the real, the tangible, the human. The digital overlords don’t want to use technology to make things happen. They want it to use it to make predictable results. Now people aren’t the solution. They’re the problem.?

SILVER LININGS

“So beautiful it made us all cry.”

Five women scientists from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)?showed up to share a world first: an image never seen before of a late-stage star shedding its mass and creating stardust – the very material from which all of us are made. They described with humble wonder how the JWST was performing better than ever expected - thanks to the tens of thousands of people who came together to make it possible for us to see further and more magnificently than ever before in human history. The deep science JWST is unleashing is devastatingly rich and will be yielding great insights for many decades to come. We saw the presence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet 600 million light years away. We saw thousands of “photobombing” galaxies in the Deep Field from the beginnings of the Universe. We all understood why these calm scientists cried when they saw these images for the first time.?

“In the worst moments of humanity, that’s when the best of humanity shows up.”

Chef/Philanthropist José Andrés?has given free meals to over 250 million suffering people through World Central Kitchen. Because, in times of trouble, a plate of food is more than a meal, it’s comfort and hope.?WCK’s approach to emergency response is rooted in listening to the needs of the community. When the organization is in a community facing unthinkable tragedy, they often hear stories that show the best of humanity. Jose talked about the responsibility that comes with this privilege and the power of storytelling to move us to act. His point: no matter the platform, we all have the power to uplift voices to help build shared understanding—something so desperately needed in our world today.

“Taste the sweetness of life. See the light. Even with darkness.”

Simran Jeet Singh, author of the best-selling book,?The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life?told us a story from his Texas childhood in which he had been frequently bullied for wearing a turban (an act of devotion to God).?He went to a roller-skating rink with his mother and three brothers. The manager said, “Get out of here with those rags on your heads.” His mother made the boys sit down and asked to step aside and speak in private with the manager. After she had been gone for a long time, he went to find her and tugged on her dress. She was crying and he had never seen her cry. That made him cry. When he asked her why she was crying, she said, “Because we are so lucky.” She explained, “I told the other parents what happened, and they and their children are all leaving in protest.” For the first time in his life, he felt like people really cared about him. It wasn’t the biggest sacrifice in the world, but it meant so much. He didn’t yet know what “solidarity” meant, but he felt it. His mother could have felt hopeless. But somehow instead of falling into the fight or flight binary, she found a different way. She invited her community in to care, to show up. She didn’t tell them what to do. They found the answer for themselves.

“We are now experiencing culture more deeply than before the pandemic.”

Priyanka Chopra Jonas?came to promote the release of?Citadel,?the new ground-breaking Amazon series she’s starring in. She was joined by the redoubtable?Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios, who has greenlit such innovative and successful series as?The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Boys,?and?Fleabag. The idea behind?Citadel?was to make a true global series. There’s a mothership show but then there’s an Indian show on the same storyline that expands outside of just one show. So that someone who saw the show in Italian will seek it out in Hindi and watch it with subtitles. “Watching shows in languages you don’t speak – with subtitles – does make the world a richer place. The sound of other languages is part of our more diverse world that’s a joy to live in,’ says delightful Priyanka. And Jennifer shared her experience of what it takes to make ground-breaking drama: “No algorithm can tell you what new show you should produce. You need creative conviction.”

"The key to New Order's first successful performances was that we toured with a scientist."

New Order?is touring again. They sounded like the future?then ?(1983). They sound like the future now.?Lead singer Bernard Sumner?explained how they managed to produce live that distinctive sound all the way back in the early 80’s. “The tech was so unpredictable we hired a scientist to tour with us and keep it all working. When he was there, it all worked. When it wasn’t, we crashed.” But why does New Order still capture our hearts? Because the lyrics and the tone are all about our yearnings, our conflicts and our loneliness. Bleak Manchester - as it was at the time - gave him and his fellow artists a need for emotion and connection. He remembered reading poetry at school and his teacher said, “What are you reading that for? Where you live, you’re just gonna work in a factory.” How fortunate, for all of us, that Bernard didn’t listen to his teacher and became the lead singer of the first band to tour with a scientist.?

“Life in 2023 is a brand-new ball. Let’s play.”

What we most missed in lockdown,?legendary performer Tilda Swinton?reminded us, was friends, family, live music – and cinema. Just like last year’s film debut sensation at SXSW,?Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, you must see it on the big screen to get the full magic. “It’s about putting on your coat, leaving the house, taking a trip, meeting someone, eating something. It’s not just turning on the screen.” The new film she stars in,?Problemista,?which debuted at the festival is all about chasing an outlandish dream. She believes there is something essential about the obstacles we all face: they reveal who we really are. And her advice to young creators: “Keep your dreams soft, malleable, flexible, porous - and fun. Don’t make your dreams breakable.” And she urged us to resist the narcissistic bent of modern life: “You don’t have to cut and run. Find your peeps and stay with them.”

RETURNING TO THE SIMPLE JOY OF BRAND BUILDING

“Ideas are fragile. Respect that truth and you have a shot at greatness.”

Brent Anderson, global chief creative officer at TBWA Media Arts Lab has helmed all of Apple’s brand expression for the last six years. What’s the key to keeping Apple the most iconic brand in the business? He cited Peter Field’s warning that short-termism is demolishing the ability of potentially great brands to do anything other than constantly chase commercial activation. And he talked about the way that ideas swirl around the agency too long and then swirl around the client’s organization so long they either get diluted or die altogether. “Concerns” with the creative are so easy to spot but then they can suck all the oxygen out of the room. Which is why he and Apple’s Tor Myhren (reporting to Tim Cook) spend so much time together in deep and honest conversation, honoring each other with attention, emulating the way that Steve Jobs and Lee Clow did the same twenty years ago. And why he’s so proud that “Shot on iPhone” has persisted now for seven years and has remained – while shape shifting in artful ways – incredibly obvious and simple.

“All the old rules don’t apply. Really? What does the data say?”

Brand scientist Dr. Ethan Decker?(“only my friends call me ‘Doctor’ and only in jest”) runs the consulting firm Applied Brand Science and calls upon his entirely non-theoretical experience as planning director at creative powerhouses 72 & Sunny and Crispin Porter. He is amazed by the fatuousness of industry “wisdom” in statements like “a good product sells itself” or “Gen Z prefer ‘purpose’ brands .” He has spent the last several years compiling and applying evidence-based truths about brand building that he cheerfully dispenses to high-anxiety clients. Most of it you can find from the Ehrenburg-Bass Institute (Byron Sharp). The modern marketer assumes their consumer is a learning machine, carefully evaluating features and benefits, weighing those against the price and making a calculated decision. Nonsense. Most of us are mental misers (lazy) and buy what looks to be popular and connects with our subconscious drivers (which you won’t discover by doing surveys, because, oh, they’re subconscious). To find that you need the "thick data" of qualitative research, like the kind that Tricia Wang and Peter Spear can help you uncover.

“We don’t actually ‘make’ decisions. We default to reflexive instincts.”?

Behavioral Scientist and Creative Director Nancy Harhut?came to remind us that we want to think we know what we’re doing and that we’re in charge but we’re not. But this truth doesn’t demean us as human beings, it simply seeks to uncover the ways that something grabs our attention and is persuasive. Priming. The same wine shop sells 77% French varietals when it plays French music and 73% German varietals when it plays German music (and no one attributes the music to their purchase selection). Rhyming makes something sound true. The consistent use of “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup” allowed the number three brand to overtake the leader. “Once you pop, you can’t stop.’ (Pringles) “Bounty is the quicker picker upper.” “No battery is stronger longer.” (Duracell). Or use alliteration. Or simile. Put an image in the mind. Keep it simple. We only buy what is easy to understand. Nancy loves the way the human mind works and takes delight in uncovering how marketing communication works - whether it’s a big campaign or email subject lines. Thank you, Nancy, for helping us to keep it real.

“Stop looking at best practices. They won’t help you.”

“Your goal should not be to jump on trends,” advises?Lorry Destainville, Head of Global Partnerships at TikTok, and?Jamie Gilpin, CMO at Sprout Social?“but to make sure that the ones you engage with are absolutely aligned with what your brand is truly all about. Otherwise, you are perceived as inauthentic – and if that happens, it’s a hard road back.” TikTok has become the monster engine that it is by making the experience rich in discovery and entertainment. The challenge for brands is how to make their message fun, involving and full of authentic humanity. Show up, listen and engage only if you have something delightful to say. And remember that sometimes the best thing you can do as a brand is just to take a pass on a new TikTok trend.

“Brands like Size + New. Instead, they should think about Meaningfulness + Momentum.”

Instead of frantically chasing after trends on the Internet, maybe you should calm down, unplug, and think about things that are enduring in their relevance and appeal. That’s the advice of none other than?Reddit’s Head of Foresight, Matt Klein. 70% of consumers don’t care if a brand is on trend. They just care if the brand cares about what they care about. 66% agree that modern brands are trying too hard. “We’re mistaking what’s trending for a machine for what’s meaningful for humans. Ask yourself instead: what future is your brand message inviting people to create for themselves? Remember the human. You can’t go wrong with that. Remember what trends really are. Clicks don’t equal meaning. Do less. And make it count.

“Lululemon spends $300 million a year on free yoga classes. They have no idea what the ROI is.”?

AnyRoad’s CEO Jonathan Yaffe?had faced a similar challenge when working at Red Bull. How do we know if an event was successful? Counting smiles just didn’t do it. He has spent years developing techniques for quantifying the emotion impact of an event. Customer lifetime value validated the gut instincts behind Lululemon’s free yoga classes. Jonathan documented the comparative effects of experiential marketing to digital marketing and experiential outperforms digital 25:1. Jonathan was joined by?Meow Wolf’s Didi Betherum?and?EventBrite’s Vivek Sagi. Didi: “What makes for an amazing experience? Surprise. Immersion. You get sucked in. Shared. People you bring. Or people you meet there. Social constructs dissolve in the Awe. You’re now open to the unknown.” Vivek: “We’re seeing two new trends: sober events and nostalgia events.”

“What if we replace Purpose with Obsession?”

American Express B2B CMO Clayton Ruebensaal?made the case for embracing obsession. Think about it. Inventors, scientists, explorers, artists and athletes – what do they all have in common? Obsession. The kind that powered the first trip to the moon, the first vaccine and some of the most successful businesses in history. “Good requires motivation. Great requires obsession,” M. Coblani once said. Clayton looked back on his career and whenever he did great work, it always the result of an obsession. The corporate mind thinks that complexity is a sign of quality. But the truth is that quality results often come from just one thing. Instead of a mission statement, what if we have a mission?

NEW POSSIBILITIES

“With AI, we can do great good. We can do great evil. It’s our choice and that’s a fact.”

Digital wunderkind whurley, CEO of StrangeWorks, told us why our future depends on the convergence of AI and quantum computing. Together they will power drug discoveries to a degree where disease itself is destined to go away, they will optimize everyday life, reduce wasted resources, eliminate bias, and free us eventually from the need to work altogether. Whurley actually sees the world of?Star Trek?coming at us at blinding speed: no more war, no more drudgery, no more money – just humans free to explore. People want to see this world as dominated by tyrants, criminals or robots run amok. “All possible,” he said, “but I’m sick of hearing about that. Saying that it automatically leads to ruin is just another kind of clickbait.” As he gave his presentation, he was holding a tablet in his hand and repeatedly looked at it. At the end of his presentation, he revealed that when he had last spoken at SXSW on quantum in 2018, it had taken him nine weeks to prepare his presentation. The presentation he had just given had all been generated by his prompts to AI in one day, the day before the presentation. His tablet was the teleprompter, and he was reading what the AI told him to say. The presentation outline, the slides, the slick artwork for the slides – all AI, all in a few minutes of work. Whoa.

“BCI’s are going to cure previously untreatable conditions.”

Benjamin Hersh, a designer at Google was part of panel talking about the nascent technology of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) - technologies that can enable us to adapt to harsh environments but can also strip us of our agency. Does “Mind Control for Good” exist? If so, what form will it take? The fact is the adjacent future is full of BCI treatments for illnesses that are beyond the reach of modern medicine. Transcranial electric stimulation for the treatment of depression is already here. In the next twenty years, watch for FDA approval on non-intrusive treatments for ALS, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, PTSD, Alzheimer’s. All in an outpatient procedure – with something the size of a grain of rice. What about mental augmentation – like Elon Musk’s Neuralink? Benjamin jokes, “You’d have a chatbot in your head. Imagine having spam in your brain. “This is horrible. Kids won’t be able to communicate with each other!” a teacher said. “We ALREADY can’t communicate with each other,” one of the students said.

“Learn to use AI and you will accelerate everything you want to accomplish.”

Futurist Amy Webb?again. Assistive AI reduces coding time by 55%. She predicts we will look back on our time as shocking - when surgeons just took out the scalpel and began to cut without the guidance of AI (How primitive!). She showed us how she used generative AI to develop a concept for a business, assess the competition, plan a required staff, define the market segments, write an investor pitch, name the company and write taglines for it – all in less time than it took her to explain it to us. What’s the key? Knowing how to write good prompts. This is a new and valuable skill to learn and unfortunately, with many American schools banning ChatGPT, it’s a skill we’re not giving students encouragement to master.?

“We won’t lose our jobs. We will lose our job descriptions.”

Futurist Ian Beacraft, CEO of Signal and Cipher?reminded us that while the industrial revolution mechanized production, the information revolution has digitized production. AI and the Metaverse give us tools which are programmable (you guide the AI), composable (you can stack skills on top of each other) and upgradable (when ChatGPT gets an upgrade, so do you). We’re entering the era of the Creative Generalists. Being a specialist is limiting. A comic book designer can render all his work into a 3D movie, totally impossible a year ago. You can make an avatar of yourself, write a script and it will deliver it in any language you want. Headsets aren’t the future of the metaverse, communal XR is. We creatively project ourselves and share it into the world. This new era beckons with the return of the apprenticeship – learning new skills opens new worlds of possibility.

“AI is just an amplifier of your own potential.”

OpenAI Co-Founder and President Greg Brockman?came to reflect on the future of AI, fresh on the heels of ChatGPT becoming the first app in history to achieve 100 million users in two months. It wasn’t new technology. It was already a year old when it launched last November. What made it scale so fast was they made it free and easy to use. Their stated mission: to make it possible for people to see what it can do – and can’t do – and what it means for the future of society. He speaks with great empathy and open-mindedness about the ethical, legal and social implications of AI, a perspective no doubt enabled by the non-profit/business partner model of OpenAI. ChatGPT’s rapid scale is in part because every business is language-based, of how it fits into what everyone wants to do and with the flow of business life.?

SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR US?

1.?????Focus on perennial human truths for your brand insight. They will last.

2.?????Love the craft that goes into being surprising and entertaining.

3.?????Think tangible; avoid the abstract.

4.?????Make it beautiful.

5.?????Use all your cunning to protect great creative against “concerns” and dilution.

6.?????Hold your ground; stick with your idea.

7.?????Keep on learning. If you don’t love it, try something new.