Posts Tagged ‘SxSW’
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SXSW 2012: What BBH is Planning & Why We Hope We’re Worth A Vote
17th August 11
Posted in awesomeness, sxsw
Although it seems insanely early every year, it’s time to start voting for panels at SxSW. Instead of spamming our professional and personal feeds with requests for support, we’re continuing a tradition we began last year of consolidating all of our potential panels into a single post.
So, if any of the below seems mildly interesting, we’d greatly appreciate a vote. All of the summaries below click-thru to the appropriate panel picker page at sxsw.com. Regardless, we’re quite excited to attend to hear what others have to say. We value the experience every year, and as always we digest everything with the benefit of context you all as the loyal Labs community provide us.
Skynet vs. Mad Max: Battle for the Future
In this session, our own Mel Exon (@melex) and Google’s Tom Uglow (@tomux) will discuss two possible futures of the web:
- A highly controlled algorithm-driven web where people and brands are matched perfectly via formula and AI, in a spam-free nirvana.
- An ongoing battle of people and brands seeking to be discovered, creating an open web with neutral techn partners and real-world spaces where tech doesn’t penetrate.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
Chief Innovation Officers Defend Their Titles
The topic of this panel was born of conversation frequently discussed on our blog in 2011: do agencies really need someone to run innovation? In this session four innovation leaders, including our Saneel Radia (@saneel) and Labs founder (now client at Google Creative Lab) Ben Malbon (@malbonnington), will answer hard questions about the value of such a role, what it actually entails, and what makes a good candidate to play the part. The panel also includes Edward Boches of Mullen (@edwardboches), Dave Armano of Edelman (@armano) and David Erixon (@dexodexo), founder of Hyper Island.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
The South By Shark Tank: Pitch Your Big Idea
This panel features Neil Munn, Global Head of BBH Zag, along with other ad industry investment professionals. In this session, the audience is invited to present their elevator pitches and receive high-level advice on how to prime the proposals for investment. Press coverage for the most attractive investments is built in via our friends at PSFK (@psfk).
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
BBH planner Tim Jones (@timjonestweet) will outline “gaming brands,” an approach to brand strategy built on gaming principles. This approach represents a fundamental shift from building brands as message transmission devices, to building brands as behaviour change systems. This talk will feature new material built on content Tim previously covered in his TEDx talk of the same name.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
Your Story Sucks! Saving Story in the Digital Age
In this session, three BBH storytellers (including @jamescmitchell, @writingstudio, and @depechetoad) from different backgrounds share the results of in-field storywriting experiments from standup to novel-writing to radio plays to alternate reality games. They’ve tried it all, and are going to try and explain what works. This is not a panel – think of it as a three-man show. This is a theoretical session, with practical homework.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
My Mom Plays That: How Women Game-Change Gaming
As women play casual games in ever-increasing numbers, this session will examine what this means for the development of casual and traditional games. It will specifically look at how the psychology of women influences the psychology of game developers. The purpose of this presentation by BBH social media manager Claire Coady (@claire_coady) is to examine how women are influencing the seismic shifts underway across the gaming landscape.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
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The Last of the Launch and Leave ‘Ems at SXSW: panel presentation
19th March 11
Posted in interactive, sxsw

Image courtesy of Made by Many
In Austin on Monday I was on a panel named in apt, Southwestern fashion “The Last of the Launch and Leave ‘Ems”, hosted by Made by Many’s Anjali Ramachandran, with Conrad Lisco from RGA New York and Peter Parkes from Skype.
Our task was to dig into “the ongoing shift in advertising and marketing from one-way campaigns to more valuable and meaningful communities and platforms.. and examine what that means for agencies and clients”. Check out Anjali’s post here or the #mxmlaunch stream on Twitter which rather excellently negates any need for a post-panel blog… such is the quality of the commentary.
With that in mind, this post is just to share, as promised, some super simple slides I talked around during the course of the panel.. And, much more importantly, to thank my co-panelists Peter, Conrad and Anjali and in particular everyone who came to see, question, support and generally contribute to a feisty debate. We had fun.
See y’all next year.
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Keep Austin Weird
1st March 11
So in 10 days we’ll be relocating the BBH Labs experience to Austin, Tx for the annual geek jamboree that is the South by SouthWest Interactive festival. I last attended three years ago, when I was an earnest book publisher and before advertising folk had descended in force and totally harshed the vibe, man.
This year I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of likeminds and seeing where, if anywhere, the paradigm has shifted and intend to follow @katylindemann‘s guidance of not going to see anything I already know anything about already, which makes for a pretty packed itinerary.
Given that the web based scheduler is, imho, ‘not very fun to use’ it might be that twitter or sitby.us prove to be more useful discovery tools for the good stuff, providing of course that wifi and/or 3G are in operation. We’ve hacked together a rough list (with agile development and rapid iterations built in!) using the web interface, the recently launched official app, an old fashioned contacts book (yes, friends and family are represented at SXSW) and have uploaded it to sitby.us where you can find it here.
Ping us if we’ve missed anything vital, if you want to hang out and, most importantly, to let me know where I should go for breakfast tacos now that Las Manitas has closed down!
See you there.
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What We’re Planning at SXSW, 2011, & Why We Hope We’re Worth Your Vote
16th August 10
Posted in awesomeness, interactive
Anyone who knows us well will already know we’re big fans of SXSW. As conferences go, it’s a glorious, greasy, gratifyingly mad brain melt of great speakers and great company all located in the strangest city ever to find itself in Texas.
Next year, we’d like to go back and do a little more than take copious notes during the day & earn our Super Swarm badges at the parties. So, here is a short outline giving you a quick rundown of the panels we’re hoping to be a part of. Many of them are around the same broad theme of agency re-engineering; we’re unapologetic about that, it’s what we’re especially interested in. Anyway, you know the gig, we won’t be doing ANY of these things without your votes and comments to help us on our way. So, this is also a huge advance thank you. We’re planning a party too, so hope to see you there over a beer and thank you in person (more on this nearer the time). In fact, you can come to that even if you don’t vote for us, but just pretend you did . . .
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The Joy of SXSW
26th March 10
Posted in awesomeness, interactive
This post is adapted from an article written for Campaign magazine (25.03.10), available online at campaignlive.co.uk next week.

SXSW banners outside Austin's conference centre (image by Ben Shaw)
South by Southwest, or SXSW as it likes to be referred to, has celebrated emerging film and music for over two decades, but 2010 was the year the Interactive component of the conference shifted up a gear and gained critical mass. Last week around 15,000 people descended on the city of Austin in Texas for 5 days of neck-deep immersion in progressive digital culture.
Despite its mind-blowing scale, a few key themes emerged for us from SXSWi’s smorgasbord of panels and presentations. Read full post



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