SXSW Sydney: The great, the good and the improvable

What’s the role of a talkfest in the age of podcasts? It’s a question I’ve been asking about conferences recently, and again after the Previously Unavailable studio headed to SXSW Sydney.

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The 15-22 October event was the first outing for the festival to this side of the world, and the first of a multi-year arrangement with Sydney to establish it Down Under. Thirteen of the PU team fanned out and attended scores of talks, functions, brand activations and music and cultural events, and came home buzzing. Here’s a rundown of the great, the good and the improvable.

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The Great and the Good

Sydney as a venue

It was amazing to be part of a proper tech festival atmosphere in Sydney. It’s always energising to get out of your daily routine – and to be in a city that has five times the people, energy, sunshine and activity of Auckland. Sydney has around 2 million residents aged between 20 and 44, and it felt like every one of them was out and about, walking fast, on the phone, getting a drink, having a run and off to dinner the whole time we were there. The new hospo openings, the easy walking access to galleries and the harbour, the infrastructure the city has put into the Darling Harbour conference and convention precinct – Sydney was pulling out all the stops. 

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Selected nuggets of goodness

There were not a lot of keynotes where people shared what they’d hard-learned and made. I love these kinds of sessions the most. A real win along these lines was Derrick Gee  – the TikTok (et al) music guy. He gave something closer to a design keynote. He talked about his practice, reflected deeply on the nature of social media and para-social relationships and delivered a talk that was super-specific and, in doing so, good and general. His takeaways – like that you need to know the value you bring and offer your audience, and find and practise authenticity – almost sound too general, but the way he pulled them together drawing on examples of his work made them universal and lasting.

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Similarly, Chance the Rapper sharing his relationship to Ghana was fascinating. It was good for the brain to hear something simply interesting, a different perspective, something far out of the tech reckons soup. He talked about Ghana overcoming colonialism, its creative community, his work with Vic Mensa to make the Black Star Line Festival, his work in social and education charity, and the nature of being an artist and a brand. His ability to have been so intentional and to chart such a positive course after gaining wild fame at age 18 is phenomenal. He got his first break partly as a result of SXSW in Austin, so it was fitting when he challenged the festival to get more indigenous and outsider voices into future events.

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The panel chat ‘Hello 2050, what’s on the menu?’ had excellent talent, a wonderful moderator in the form of Rove McManus, a star guest chef in Neil Perry and some good food tasting theatre. The panel best answered that interesting title provocation when Ernesto Rodríguez Vecilla, the innovation chief at food startup Nourish Ingredients, told us about the work it’s doing to create non-animal fats that act like animal fats, and so helping elevate meat alternatives to be analogues. That was seriously cool – and it would have been amazing to hear about other leading bits of food-tech. 

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After this talk I was left feeling I’d love to hear these panellists on a podcast with another subject matter expert. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the big benefit of these events now is to get a list of sparky, interesting people and chase down podcasts they appear on, and it’s okay to sit in a big theatre and be entertained by a true professional like Rove.

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Brand activations

This is going to be the place for people to try to activate their tech and associated brands from now on. There were serious investments and statements from Amazon Prime, Suntory and Spotify and a lot of energy in the expo hall. Expect to see this as part of people’s brand strategies for now on. Although, as ever, if you’re going to yell when everyone else is yelling you better have something interesting to share, as you could also see some examples of big investment for little love.

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The Improvable

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The big conference challenge: content levels in a podcast age

It’s not easy curating things today. It’s hard to pitch content at the right level, so it can be of interest to a general audience but of value to a specialist audience in an age when podcasts have made deep and useful conversations on any topic accessible at any time.

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Often the approach is to have broad appeal, big-name keynotes, and then specialist panels and workshops in which people pass deep knowledge on to other specialists. SXSW Sydney followed this model a little, with some big names (Cindy Gallop, Charlie Brooker and Chance the Rapper were all great) and probably room for a lot more workshops.

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So many reckons

A big part of SXSW’s industry engagement is getting people to suggest topics and people for panels ahead of the event, and build out the schedule from this. This is great in theory, but are panels really always the best use of everyone’s time and experience? 

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Some were great. I attended one on venture studios – a topic we’re very interested in at Previously, as a venture studio – and it managed to give a good overview of the challenges and opportunities in the space, but also went deep on some of the ways incentives can be best aligned, equity amounts decided, and roles and responsibilities of founders and leaders structured. It had top talent and thoughtful topic selection.

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But some were about well-canvassed topics like AI, and although it’s a hot topic there was not much light to be shed. The biggest opportunity for improvement? Imagine if the high-quality talent had each prepared a 20-minute talk for us. Maybe with such a glut of content, more in-depth and put-together perspectives on matters would be a win. 

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That’s not to say there was a lack of good panels; there were literally too many interesting-looking things to choose from. The session on walking between two worlds and navigating the space between two cultures was a highlight of the week for some of our team, and the space panels were great – especially when the Australian Space Agency discussed its role with and contribution to NASA on Artemis missions.

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Integration of music and games

In the US, SXSW is a key part of the A&R cycle, serving to prove and break artists – and the Australian version obviously can’t get to that cultural position in its first outing. SXSW Sydney had the talent, and made a great start, and I’m sure it’ll find its role in the local industry. I was there on a tech pass, rather than a music focused ticket; attendees can choose a quite pricey Platinum pass, which gives you priority access to everything, or tech, gaming or music as their focus, which is much more cost effective. 

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I would have loved the festival feeling to be more present and integrated throughout, with maybe more of the keynotes taking place on the music stages rolling into showcases of artists, so all of us could have greater exposure to more of the cultural side of events. 

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Overall, a great start

Anyhow, this shouldn’t seem like criticism. I loved it, our team loved it, and everyone I ran into was so positive about the scale, people, commitment and good vibes. There’s a convention that you don’t review a restaurant in its first month, and I think maybe it would also be unfair to put too much weight on reckons of a festival on its first go. So much of what SXSW Sydney did was bang-on. I’m very excited for its future and will be there next year, enjoying, hopefully, another energising adventure and lovely break from the Auckland rain. 

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