Catching great ideas at SXSW Interactive Festival
Grant Hunter, regional creative director APAC of Iris Worldwide – who divides his time between Singapore and the rest of iris’ offices across the APAC region – attended SXSW in Austin, Texas last week. Here he gives a day by day account on the 19th annual Interactive festival exclusively for Campaign Brief.
DAY ONE
SXSW interactive has kicked off. The Texan sun from last year has been replaced by what feels like weather imported from Manchester, England. It’s been wet, very wet. And it feels like the world has descended on this Texan town.
The latest trend this year has to be queues. The queue for a cab was an hour at the airport. The queue to pick up your pass seemed to snake around the whole conference center and was even longer. The queue of people moaning saying South By isn’t as good as it used to be. There’s loads of chatter about too many people and the fact the festival has jumped the shark. The long termers are always protective of the festival and they hate the fact that the ‘douchebags’ have invaded their territory. So the weather isn’t the best and it’s made everything seem congested but there are almost too many things on the schedule that demand your attention.
SXSW still has masses to offer. And it can be quite overwhelming as you try to pick the right panels out of the schedule. Using the SXSW Go app on the iPad has certainly made it easier. Over the next few days I’ll share a few of the things that have captured my attention over here.
This afternoon we caught up with David Scott (middle of pic with myself and Jon Burkhart, Social Media Creative Director at iris Worldwide) who was talking about his new ebook Newsjacking. Scott’s Power Law states that a News story has a shelf life of 48 hours if you want to ride its trending wave.
Ideally if you can strike in the first few hours you’ll stand a better chance of being successful. David shared a few examples including the Tio crocodile insurance that the Northern Territory Government presented to the U.S. President when he flew into Darwin. The 6 dollar policy would pay out $50k if the president got attacked. It generated loads of press coverage in Australia and showed that the territory was sparing no expense when it came to looking after the political leader. David stated that you have to act NOW before the opportunity passes.
In a second example he talked about another politician and the infamous picture he sent to a lady friend. Anthony Wiener (a left leaning politician according to Scott and the picture) hit the headlines and had to step down. Within hours Larry Flint of Hustler offered Wiener the new role of VP for Hustler’s Internet division via a blog post. This cunningly became the second paragraph in many News pieces. By giving journalists a new angle it added spice to the story and guaranteed Hustler free press. He also talked about the unfortunate incident that saw Richard Branson’s Necker island home burn down. Kate Winslet ran in and saved Branson’s mum and it was all over the News. In another second paragraph example the London Fire Brigade offered free firefighting training to Winslet on her return to London. Again it gave the press something else to add interest to the initial story.
Scott concluded that Newsjacking is a mindset. He recommended that companies should implement three things:
1. Appoint a Chief Real-Time Officer
2. Develop real-time guidelines
3. Invest in systems that monitor in real-time
Scott looks at Newsjacking through a PR lens. Tomorrow our Urgent Genius panel explores real-time creativity and Newsjacking from a creative perspective. We’re talking with satirical animators NMA from Taiwan, Michael Logan heads up their content arm and he’ll explain the magic behind their rapid-fire animations. IKEA365 creator Remco Marinus from Lemz Amsterdam is our second panelist and his team shot a new ad ever day for a year. And last but by no means least @Bronx ZoosCobra (who has been trending today as people heard that she’s going to be in town for our panel) is the second most followed animal on Twitter. I’m looking forward to hosting the panel and the debate that ensues.
DAY TWO
The rain kept on coming down today. It meant more queues, yet again. We had an hour’s wait to get a cab to take us to The Sheraton for our real-time Newsjacking panel. For a while it looked like we might not make it. But eventually we made it to the venue and we were pleasantly surprised by the turnout. Over a hundred and fifty joined us for the session so a big thank you to those who made it out in the heavy rain.
Our international panel featured some of the best work featured from our blog. Michael Logan from Next Media Animation in Taiwan showed some of their greatest hits. The audience lapped up their satirical takes on news events. They ranged from Tiger Woods being attacked by his wife to an epic tech battle between the Dark Lord Gates and the young Jedi Jobs. Visit NMA.tv to view their latest exploits.
We then heard from Remco Marinus, the CD at Lemz, Amsterdam; who created the IKEA365 campaign. They produced a new commercial every day for a year. They went through an intense process that saw them shoot 15 spots every two weeks. They had to write and rewrite again to keep the intensity up. Both NMA and Lemz use an editorial mindset to achieve fresh relevant work in a rapid turnaround process. Both companies are using processes that align with our Urgent Genius philosophy.
Our final special guest, The Bronx Zoos Cobra, was in fine form. We had purchased a 5-star tank with a pretty luxurious bed for her. Unfortunately she decided to take a tour of Austin and proceeded to tweet her every move as she went on the search for food. You can check out some of her exploits on her SXSW Twitter feed. It has kept the audience amused and judging by the number of tweets the snake is as popular as ever.
From a snake that escaped, I jumped to an individual who evaded capture for almost a decade. I attended the Frank Abagnale talk in the Convention Center at 3pm. Frank is the central character in the film Catch Me If You Can. He was probably the U.S’s greatest con man. And what’s even more amazing is the fact that he was only 16 years old when he ran away from home and started his wide-spread trickier. It was a really popular talk and yet again a queue stood in the way between my goal and I.
I was determined to get into the ballroom so I used my best blagging skills to get in. Everyone was queuing to get into Ballroom F but E had another undiscovered door. Wit
h the lunchtime beverage wanting to make an early exit it was time for a quick visit to the restrooms. On my return to door E my plan appeared to not be as well thought through as I at first thought. A fierce female sentinel (she was actually a very nice lady) wearing a red SXSW t-shirt stood in my way. I made a plea with the newly appointed guardian of the doors to say that I had just popped out to the restroom. With a little persuasion she begrudgingly let me in. I like to think that Frank would’ve been proud of me. I took my seat on the floor along with hundreds of others. We were instructed to keep the aisles free so after lots of bum shuffling the Health and Safety officials were happy and the session began.
Frank opened with the announcement that his story has been told by many people and all had used a degree of creative spin. So today he was going to tell the story as he saw it. Interestingly he has had nothing to do with the various films and theatre productions about his life, that’s because the FBI prevented him from talking about his exploits whilst he was a government agent.
Frank talked at a rapid pace and he recounted his life story in short engaging bursts. He painted a picture of a young 16 year old kid who had run away from his parent’s divorce. A kid who spotted opportunity and then went on to exploit it. But he was keen to stress that these were the actions of a child. And his actions from the past were those that he would not endorse today. Frank was very remorseful about his story. He now works for the FBI as an security consultant on ideas he could have actioned years ago. As Frank talked it became clear that he regrets parts of his past but is doing absolutely everything to make people re-consider who and what he is. It was a great speech.
DAY THREE
Things have warmed up on day 3 out here in Austin. The sun has started to shine and I hit seven different talks. I purposefully went to diverse talks that were away from the ‘brand’ and ‘marketing’ area to get a different perspective. I’ve picked out a few highlights.
I popped into the Lytro camera presentation. Lytro utilises lightfield technology.
Lightfied was originally proposed by Faraday in 1846 but the term wasn’t coined until 1936 by Alexander Gershun.
Over the last 2 decades Lytro have been researching and refining the technology so that it’s consumer ready. Lightfield basically means the camera captures and preserves the direction of all light in an image. The direction of every individual ray is captured. This means you can refocus the image on your computer after it has been taken. They maintain that it will change photography as you have rich 2d, 3d+ and interactive data. Later in the year they will release a camera thatwill shoot so that everything is in focus, a model with true tilt shift capability and a 3d camera. Sean Reynolds (Global CD at iris) from our New York office has one of the first cameras to ship and it’s definitely an interesting proposition, if not a little quirky to use. After going to the presentation I showed Sean how to zoom in and out using the touch sensor on the top of thecamera – something Sean hadn’t worked out how to do. In typical bloke fashion he hadn’t bothered to read the instructions. You can read more about this quirky little camera here: lytro.com/camera
As part of the research for the Urgent Genius book we’ve been looking at Google’s people finder so seeing that Pablo Maygrundter, one of Google’s Software Engineers was speaking I was keen to hear more about it. The Adapting new technologies for Humanitarian aid panel featured Kate de Rivero, Comms Manager at WAHA international and Ivan Gayton, head of Mission at MSF, alongside the Google man.
Kare talked about WAHA’s work in Africa where they are on a mission to cut the number of women dying in childbirth . There’s a huge lack of personal medical records but there’s a huge uplift in mobile usage across the continent. 640 million phone users from a total population of 1 billion. This change has been rapid and that’s down to the legacy of bad landlines. Africans have rushed to the mobile phone as it’s the first time there’s been a means of mass communication. Various services are popping up to help remote communities become more connected. She showed a few interesting examples:
icow in Kenya is used by farmers to manage their livestock.
ushahidi.com maps out text messages to co-ordinate citizen to help which is particularly good for natural disaster situations.
Motechin Ghana is a Bill Gates funded service. It’s a mobile midwife that sends reminders to expectant mothers to get them to attend their Doctor’s appointments. Many of the mothers are illiterate so the service uses audio messages.
Mpesa, means money in Swahili and it’s a way of transferring money by text message. It’s used widely by people to pay for their travel.
Taking the above examples as inspiration WAHA have set up a service with Microsoft called Health Vault. They are going to trial it in South East Senegal where many mothers are in remote locations and can be up to 3 days away from the health centre.
It’s a Personal Health Record for private and secure data sharing. It uses a simple message service. An SMS code is sent via the phone to update records. This will allow the health services to have synced up records across the country for the first time. It will revolutionise how the services operate as it will allowthem to identify outbreaks of disease
Ivan and Pablo then talked about the Haiti earthquake and the resulting cholera outbreak. Ivan was the first emergency coordinator there when the disease broke out cholera is a bacterial disease that has a simple treatment – rehydrate. You just need water with a few electrolytes. But it can spread like wildfire and the fatality rate is 40%. Haiti was quite unique as there hadn’t been cholera there for 100 years because it’s surrounded by developed countries, so when it hit it hit hard. The country had no systems to deal with – health service and the people didn’t know how to deal with it. It was the largest intervention that MSF have done they treated 110 thousand cases of cholera. It became extremely important for them to
know where they need to be. A guy in the office had Google Earth map on his screen and that sparked a thought inspired by John Snow and his cholera map of London in the 1800s. Ivan stressed that mapping is potentially a better way to improve the response. Maps can save lives he thought so -he rang MSF’s NYC office and asked them to ring Google to see if they could help.
Pablo then described the process they went through. He was working on the infrastructure for real-time search and he looked up some old projects for 911 and Katrina. In just 48 hours had a rough prototype to help find people on the map. It was a big deal to share real-time data during a disaster. The Google team however found out when they were on the ground that all the assumptions they had made had serious flaws. The quality of the internet is temperamental in Haiti. You can’t expect DNS and the cloud to be there all of the time so their architecture didn’t work. They had to rely on some old tech (ironic considering the title of the talk). They used a load of GPS Garmin units from Best Buy, some pool chlorine kits and spreadsheets. This meant the low skilled, low educated locals could gather the data by jumping on bikes and filling in a spreadsheet. They then collated all of the data and mapped all of the water systems on Google maps. The map took the data from the health centres and showed which neighbourhoods had the biggest problems. This tool became really useful as a way for MSF to prompt action from health partners UNICEF and the water authority. Ivan explained that they had had data in spreadsheets previously but they hadn’t been able to visualise it until Google’s mash up.
Today’s interactive keynote by Cyborg lover Amber Case titled Ambient location and the future of the Interface was incredibly popular. She talked about how ethereal data is and that we are now accessing our ‘stuff’ through mini portals. Mobiles/tablets/computers are actually becoming an extension of our brains.
The amount of digital stuff we are creating is immense. She showed two pieces by Nick Rodrigues. He created an installation titled Email Garden. It features fake grass that grows as he receives email. In real-time it shows a representation of the amount of data in his inbox in a really playful way. And a portable cell phone booth to give you privacy when you’ve on your mobile.
She then moved on to the main part of her theory. She’s become interested in technology that gets out of the way. Technology that does away with the traditional visual interface. She took us on a journey starting in Xerox Park in the 70s. Xerox had a concept called Calm Technology. Simply put it describes the fact that people get angry with bad technology. Calm tech just works and lets you get on with your life. One example she described, the Haptic compass belt, buzzes when you go North. It gives the wearer a sixth sense Case maintains that this would be a better (and safer interface) for sat nav rather than the current visual ones.
She then talked about her tutor who tracked his locations every 5 secs for 2 years and then made ‘invisible buttons’ that left messages in places for people. She recounted how strange it was for her when she followed his tracks and heard his observations. “Look to your right raspberries, hey look it’s the Burnside Bridge”. ‘Geo fences’ detect when you’ve in their vicinity and activate certain pre-determined functions. For example a geo fence around your home could turn the lights turn on when you arrive and off when you leave. Your phone can become a remote controller for your life. Data with context becomes really useful. Case closed with the following thought:
The best technology gets out of the way to help you get on with life so that you’re not chained to the desktop.
DAY FOUR
On day four I focused on branded content and socially powered comedy. I started the day with a brand journalism panel where the general discussion weaved around the difference between brand journalism and corporate coms. The key take out seemed to be that brand journalism reports on the wider picture a combination of outside voices and the inner voice of the brand/company.
Traditionally PR functions want to control the message where as a journalist wants to convey the message.
In the era of PR’able ideas and the creation of branded content it seems imperative that from a creative advertising perspective we adopt more of an editorial point of view.
Total spend is up 60% in the US and clients are looking for articles that engage and they are willing to spend more on ‘content’ .
A panel later in the day focused on the power of branded documentaries. It looked at P&Gs Pantene beautiful lengths campaign. The biggest anxiety for women who are diagnosed with the disease is the fear of losing their hair.
Beautiful Lengths supplies real hair wigs to those sufferers. It is run in conjunction with the American Cancer Society. Last year they donated 12,000 wigs. The branded documentary approach was chosen as the best way to tell the human stories behind the initiative. The campaign has ignited a movement and hair cutting events have sprung up around the country.
The documentary film makers ‘Flow non fiction’ visited one school where 195 girls had signed up to get their hair cut. Budgets were tight (they didn’t actually say how much) so the film was shot in a day and a half in Londonderry.
The constraint allowed them to show the community around the cause illustrated by one school. The panel discussed why branded doc was the right way to go.They gave the following advice: If the role of the brand isn’t cinematically interesting then you shouldn’t force it.
Ask yourself “Are you in it for the long term?”
The cutting party at the school wasn’t created by them it happened organically so finding that was key. The haircut moment – joy or tears it’s a signature moment where the donors give of themselves.
Don’t tell them show them. The thing women feared most is losing their hair – the film made the stats real/human so great for PR and hitting influencers.
I then jumped from moving human drama to a little bit of light relief. Jon Burkhart, our iris Social Media Creative Director, presented the Not So Allied Forces Of Social Comedy.
The dual panel featured Jon with Will Saunders the head of BBC Comedy online. They showcased innovations from the
US comedy scene from the likes of Comedy Central and TV innovations such as Zee box and Miso. Jon then talked about the opportunity of creating comedy that hijacks the News.
He shared The Artistifier, an UrgentGenius creation, which rode the Oscars trending wave. The site converts anyYouTube film to black and white, overlays The Artist music and allows you to add your own captions. It has had over 170,000 visits.
Will then went on to give us a peek of a pilot comedy show called @CuffLive. @CuffLive takes the Urgent Genius principles and real-time tools to create a new socially enabled comedy format.
The pitch tape showed the test event they ran in London at a comedy club. Three comics were subjected to challenges powered by the audience’s social networks. It looked like an updated improv comedy show for the social age. I particularly liked the segment where they picked one audience’s Facebook page and created a series of sketches using her status updates. I’m interested to see how this develops.
The BBC has been a great breeding ground for UK talent if they take learnings from the US and build on it I’m sure we’ll see some interesting results.