Dan Lacaze: A suit’s perspective on the SXSW conference taking place in Austin, Texas
Dan Lacaze, a Group Account Director at BMF Sydney, is attending SXSW in Austin, Texas. Here he gives a suit’s perspective of the first five days of the conference exclusively for Campaign Brief.
Day 1: the arrival
Why is it that suits rarely get a trip abroad? Sure we enjoy the odd long lunch, but you’d have to sneak an award winning ad through your ECD to get a ticket to Cannes. And unless you’ve got ‘Digital’ in your title you’ll have a hard time convincing management you need to be at SXSW.
Have faith my dear friends, for the times they are a changing.
The interactive world descends on Austin, Texas each March for the biggest and most progressive digital conference in the world. And I have just arrived (albeit without my suit). That’s ok, because everywhere you go there is a gaggle of geeks in jeans and t-shirts hammering away furiously on keyboards, thumbing phones and adjusting spectacles.
My old mate Paul Dery (pictured above left with me today) is the ECD at R/GA Austin, and he has kindly offered to show me the ropes and give me his inside tips on the best keynotes. He picked me up this evening from the airport in his “hog” (old Ford Bronco) and we went direct to a Texan BBQ rib house where they smoke meat for 13 hours a day! Paul loves America and his insight into the way the yanks consume media, particularly the impact of a high penetration of Cable and IPTV, is a foreshadowing of what is about to happen at home.
On top of that, my Australian Uber app worked seamlessly to get me back to the hotel after dinner. In fact it had augmented features such as the ability to stream your own Spotify playlist to the car, or share a ride, and these features didn’t require a new app download.
If we’re a couple of years behind the States, then it’s an exciting time for Australia.
And it’s an exciting time to be a #bmfSuitInSXSW
Day 2: the Capital
There’s not many cowboys in the capital of Texas.
It’s awash with an eclectic mix of geeks, marketeers, ad men/women, entrepreneurs and celebs. Downtown Austin is closed to traffic and it’s buzzing with people, bars and food trucks (I am still trying to locate The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart truck). Every big hotel in town is hosting SXSW events, and in short it is incredible.
Austin is a tech hotbed. Google Fiber is on trial here – they promise a connection that’s up to 1,000 megabits per second, and there are lines around the block to get into their store.
Ryan Gosling and Guillermo Del Toro held a session today. So did Al Gore. There are NASA trucks parked out the back of the Convention Centre and they are presenting a keynote on how they are going to get to Mars.
My first session was Beacons, mPay and the Great Shopper Reboot. Much of the discussion was around how technology can facilitate a smoother online to bricks and mortar purchase. Lowe’s, a big box hardwear retailer, was represented by their Director of Digital Experience. They use real-time inventory tracking and have developed an app so their staff can capture live conversations with consumers about projects, build a shopping list of what the consumer needs, and then track their purchase behaviour.
The Director of Retail Analytics from Intel was really impressive. Intel has developed an iKeg with one of the big brewers here. It monitors tap and keg “velocity” and provides a wealth of real time data about what beer is being drunk, at what time, in what bar, and what speed etc. This allows brewers to react quickly to minimise out of stocks, swap overs and ultimately ensure the freshest draught beer.
Beacons seem to be a bit 2014. Who ever asked to be bombarded with messages on their phone when they walk past a store? There was some interesting application around linking SKUs to video content in-store e.g. in Fashion you could wave your phone over a beacon to see an instant feed of how a product is worn/accessorised, or in Grocery you could get an instant recipe and video on how to cook your Xmas leg of ham.
Privacy and use of data was also a hot topic. It’s now possible to have disposable RFID tags imbedded in clothes to track stock movement in store (and out of store once it’s bought!). Intel were also working on facial recognition software that can determine your age and gender.
It’s Minority Report stuff.
See the full SXSW On Streaming Schedule here.
Day 3: New frontiers
Battery life is the holy grail.
If I were working for any of the hardware giants, I would be pouring all my innovation budget into increasing battery life.
Wherever there is a powerpoint, there is a SXSWer plugged in, and people are perpetually wired to their devices.
Perhaps the answer is not longer battery life, but a move back to interchangeable battery packs that can be swapped at vending machines or 7-11’s?
This insatiable desire for data and content was discussed in a session I attended titled Content Marketing vs Don Draper: the end of ads? There was a heavy hitting panel of senior global execs from GE, L’Oreal and Dell, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they were all women. Much of the debate was around ‘native’ advertising and the rise of branded content.
So what’s an ad these days?
The panel defined an ad as ‘great compelling content that’s worth sharing’.
GE have it right. Being founded by an inventor (Thomas Edison) they place innovation at the core of their business. They have created ‘Disruption Labs’ that drive their marketing communications. One output of these Labs is the GE Moon Boot sneakers, created to commemorate the company’s role in providing materials for the astronauts on Apollo 11. The limited edition sneakers were launched on Snapchat, and sold for $196.90, a reference to 1969, the year of the mission.
The GE Global Director of Brand was embarrassed to admit they had a marketing department and a separate digital department only a few years ago.
GE want to “be around” Science and Technology, and they understand they can’t be the centre of the conversation anymore. They have been working with BBDO for decades but now have over ten agencies they partner with. They described the modern Agency village model as different and chaotic, but more fun and full of enormous potential.
I’m not sure how Don would handle life in an Agency village. At least he didn’t have to worry about battery life.
Day 4: The Wild West
People are here in Austin to make their fortune.
I attended a session called ‘Acing the Sporting Game with the Oculus Rift’. Three (very handsome) Dutch blokes were pitching how they were using Virtual Reality and Oculus Rift to train the national Dutch football team.
The biggest club in the Dutch League, Ajax Amsterdam, were also using the technology to help their players deconstruct their performance by reliving critical moments from a game, from other team mate’s perspectives. Apparently it’s had a huge impact on locker room politics!
Critically, it enabled the Coaches to train their teams for longer, as they only have so many physical hours they can put in on the pitch per day. They had some interesting studies on brain training and how it enhanced their players overall performance.
Oculus Rift was bought by Facebook for
$3.2 billon. Samsung, Sony and HTC are now all in the game developing high-end headsets.
But the really interesting application is when the tech becomes democratised and accessible for the masses. The Dutchies also had disposable cardboard headset with lenses. You could download an app, and place your phone behind the lenses to create your own VR experience.
When you think about the application of these disposable kits for in-stadia viewing (I want to see what happened on the other side of the field), and in-home viewing (let me be Cahill when he scored that header) the possibilities are both exciting and endless.
In the future we won’t just purchase physical tickets, we’ll be buying a League pass with on-demand viewing, across multiple devices, with game day tickets for your team, and a virtual ticket to augment the lot.
It’s wild.
Day 5: the Pioneers
I sat in a NASA session today and an astro-physiscist used the words “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” as he showed us some inter-galatic images from the Hubble telescope.
The crowd of geeks were in heaven.
John Grunsfeld, NASA astronaut and NASA Associate Administrator for Science was also very entertaining. He has been to space three times, and he talked us through his mission to repair and upgrade components on the Hubble, an $8b piece of tech that orbits earth. The drama of his space walk, footage of his tomfoolery in zero gravity and the perspective he has gained from time in space were awarded with a standing ovation from the crowd.
NASA are an incredible pioneering organisation. Despite their intellectual capacity, they believe that most smart people in the world don’t work for them.
They therefore created ‘NASA Solve‘, a crowd sourcing initiative to find ideas from the public to further their goals. They have $70m to award to people who crack their challenges. For example the Asteroid Grand Challenge, an initiative to better identify asteroids that may prove dangerous to earth, generated 700 ideas from over 1,000 people with 31 winners. It has improved NASA’s ability to detect rogue asteroids by 15%.
Another design initiative, to improve the quality and dexterity of the gloves the astronauts wear, awarded a prize to the man who designs the wings for the Victoria Secret models.
Such is the pioneering spirit of the yanks.
They have genuinely proven that the crowd can help with rocket-science.
Dan Lacaze is a Group Account Director at BMF. With over 13 years experience in the industry, Dan has been driven by the power of creativity to create unfair advantage. He has worked across a range of Agencies and also spent three years on the inside at Coca-Cola. Whilst there he launched Coca-Cola Australia into social media. He then delivered the experiential component of the Share a Coke campaign, and most recently developed a world first innovation for Australia Post – a Video Stamp, which has been awarded at Cannes, D&AD, the Webby’s and the Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards. At BMF Dan works on Lion, FFA, Sporstbet and new business.