Richard Donovan’s SXSW Diary #2

Richard Donovan (left), creative director at LIDA has been sent to SXSW 2018 in Austin, Texas. Here Donovan wraps up SXSW.

All good things must come to an end.

And Thursday morning in Austin feels just like that.

The orange interactive lanyards have all but disappeared and while there are more green music lanyards around, it’s nowhere near the numbers. I’m going to squeeze what I can out of my platinum lanyard in the next 24 hours, but it feels like the party’s over.

Of course, as a creative, SXSW always felt a bit like a party I was crashing. This is technology heaven and these technologies have completely upended our game after all.

Newspaper and print advertising have been squeezed and squeezed. The TV is no longer the primary screen in the house (if its in the house at all) and the primary time length is going with it, decreasing from 30 seconds to six in little over a decade.

But while the mediums have changed or expanded, the need for the humanity and craft that creativity brings is everywhere. From the six second moving poster social films, to the three-hour immersive Brand Home experience, storytelling and wit, visual or linguistic, are still the best ways to engage.

UX animation, the speech of chatbots, the elongation of stories over customer journeys need the same art direction and copywriting flare, but tuned to new mediums.  People want brands that talk to them as a person and give them a smile and that means a person at the other end. At least for now.