Seven Trends from SXSW 2016

I’m just back from my first trip to SXSW and it certainly lived up to all the overwhelming, chaotic inspiring hype I’d been promised. With dozens of talks going on across multiple venues simultaneously, it’s almost impossible for an individual to get an overview as such but I have tried to highlight 7 topics that seemed to come up more than most.  Maybe it’s my psyche or some kind of unconscious bias but the first few trends I noticed were all quite scary…  

1. Dark Web and ‘Fraud as a Service’…
Adam Tyler the CIO of cyber security firm CSID gave a sobering talk about the ease with which the so called dark web could be reached (via Reddit if you are interested) to access stolen credit card data, to launch ‘ransom-ware’ attacks or even set up bit coin accounts in order to receive fraudulent commissions – all of which he did as a live demo to show how effortless it all was! There were plenty of terrifying stats about the volume of malicious software launched every day, but none more so than the realisation that none of the things he did required any coding knowledge. Astonishingly, online fraud is being offered ‘as a service’ to the extent that one of the credit card fraud forums was also carrying banner advertising for legitimate companies – one of them a US Bank.  (Which probably says more about banner inventory accountability, but that’s a whole other conference.)

2. …Not to be confused with Dark Social…
Far less menacing than it sounds – the rise of referrals and sharing activity through instant messaging apps or emails with links etc isn’t trackable by search engines or traditional analytics and therefore ‘dark’.  As the likes of Snapchat, WhatsApp and WeChat continue to grow this could become of increasing concern to marketers trying to integrate messaging into consumer journeys.

3. …Connected Everything is not all good (back to dark web, fraud etc)
Of all the endless displays and talks about connected devices – cars, kids toys, fridges, planes Amazon echo etc – I was drawn to a talk entitled ‘An Internet of Junk’ which was a timely warning about how easy it is to harvest a google account from say a connected fridge. Or to hack into a plane’s OS from a laptop whilst sitting on the plane (as someone did recently). Or even take over a moving car as some journalists did recently in the UK. Clearly the rise of connected devices is not going to stop anytime soon but my awareness of the dangers of cybercrime, data security and privacy has been heightened to borderline paranoia!

4. …Empathetic robots and the march of AI…
There was much talk of Google owned Deep Mind and its AlphaGo machine beating the world Go champion 4-1 whilst I was in Austin (reminiscent of IBM’s Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov at chess 20 years ago) However, whilst this was extraordinary in a narrow AI sense (eg it used deep learning to constantly improve one task) the most extreme example of machine learning was seeing ‘Sophie’ the robot answer questions live from the audience. As well as having near perfect human features and skin she managed to talk about human rights compared to the rights of machines. This is no longer the realm of science fiction despite later talks reassuring us that ‘the singularity’ was decades away and nothing to worry about!   

5. …The new reality is Virtual…
It was impossible to move in Austin without tripping over (or watching someone else tripping over) a VR demo of some kind. From McDonalds transporting you to the inside of a Happy Meal (yes really) to Google Fiber’s VR artist events to Samsung promising to bringing you a ‘dope #GearVR experience #VRondemand’ one was left in no doubt as to how hard many brands are working to bring VR experiences to the fore.
 
6. …Social messaging trumps social media…
As I learnt about the overwhelming use of WhatsApp in Brazil for example, it became clear that messaging apps generally (with more intimate, narrowcast sharing) have overtaken social networks as the dominant platforms in terms of users. Many panels addressed the next multibillion dollar opportunity of how to credibly use marketing in messaging apps. One thing was for certain, crass conversation starters from brands were not the answer in such an intimate space. As one panellist remarked; ‘don’t be that guy’…

7. …Obama still inspiring after 8 years in power
Of course this is not a trend as such, but my experience of SXSW was massively enhanced by being able to hear Obama speak so cogently and intelligently around many difficult issues – making Government better through digital, improving the banking system, the agonizing choices around privacy versus national security etc. He clearly doesn’t have all the answers but compared to the current circus of campaigning by his wannabe successors he came across as authentic, considered and inspiring.   
 
Read more from Chris Pearce and TMW here.