Digiday is at SXSW giving you the latest industry news out of the festival at Austin, Texas. More from the series →
SXSW is still all about the tacos and tech, but the annual conference for tech, film and music still has some notable new features and appearances.
For one, Austin now has electric scooters, so SXSW’s more than 70,000 attendees can forget about hailing an Uber (or one using local ride-hailing app Ride Austin) and instead hop on a scooter to get across town. HBO, in partnership with Giant Spoon, is back with another experiential event. But instead of transporting attendees to “Westworld” to drink old fashioned, they’re being asked to donate their blood on behalf of “Game of Thrones.” And then there’s a bunch of 2020 presidential candidates here to show off how digitally savvy they can be.
Here’s our take on what’s popular and what’s not at this year’s SXSW.
More in Marketing
Marketers shift growing shares of search spending to GEO
Generative AI is pushing brands to shift SEO budgets toward visibility in AI-generated answers over clicks.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese pulls dollars from search – people aren’t Googling ‘cream cheese’
Philadelphia Cream Cheese has stopped paying for search ads, at least to prospective shoppers on Google. Over the past year, the Kraft Heinz-owned CPG brand has phased out its traditional search ad spend, opting to put those dollars instead into retail media and broader channels, according to Maddy Zingle, vp of marketing for Philadelphia Cream […]
TikTok courts CMOs with first-ever Collective, as it targets bigger budgets
In its first CMO-focused event in the U.K. TikTok showcased how easy it is for brands to create content. The event is only part of the platform’s sharper 2026 commercial strategy: targeting larger, long-term ad budgets, courting independent agencies, and positioning itself as a serious competitor to Meta in 2026.