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October’s been a busy month, partly because I devoted a few days to SXSW Sydney, soaking up some new ideas about the film, music, tech and games industries. Once you get past the hefty ticket price and navigate the many venues, there’s plenty to enjoy, and because Sharpe Advisory’s work crosses all those aforementioned industries, I find there’s plenty to keep my mind ticking over.
A lot of the program focused on emerging trends in these industries, so there’s plenty of time to think about what’s going to impact the future of creative business. Amongst the 20+ sessions I attended, I found a few key ideas staying with me. These are things I can see influencing creative entrepreneurship in the near future – if they’re not already.
In no particular order…
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Grabbing your customer’s attention is getting harder. Sabri Suby (a familiar face from Shark Tank and his high-octane ads on Instagram) was interviewed for a session called Evolve or Perish: The Future of Digital Marketing. He talked about the contest for attention. Never before has there been so much competition for our time. He says, if your product or service isn’t compelling enough for someone to interrupt their news feed, it’s not cutting through.
This was put in context for me by a question from the crowd about which platforms to use to market an independent film. His answer: cut a kickass trailer and put it on Facebook and YouTube. Nothing earth-shattering there, but it was his rationale for why that was his answer that caught my attention.
“You are,” he said to this filmmaker, “in the demand generation business, not the demand capture business”. He means no one goes to Google to search for an independent film to watch. There’s no latent demand to capture, so you have to generate the demand through hype.
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But amongst all this noise, people still want to feel special. According to Suby, the future is one of 1-1 direct marketing of ads to consumers, hyper-personalised by data from how you interact with a brand online. But there was an interesting counterpoint to this from Melanie Perkins, co-founder of Canva, in the festival’s opening session, which made me think that there’s a level of client interaction that hyper-personalisation won’t necessarily supply.
I thought I knew more or less about the Canva story, but it has more twists and turns than I expected. I didn’t know that it started as an online tool for designing and printing school yearbooks. Perkins retold the familiar story of the long, hard slog for investors to scale the product into a more general “design for non-designers” platform. The eventual $3M seed investment came from a “party plan” of investors – lots of small investors rather than one big one. Well, except for the Federal Government, which put in $2M from its Commercialising Australia program. I wonder what Mariana Mazzucato, an advocate for more of the value invested by Government in businesses to be returned to public hands, would say about that.
Anyway, Perkins reiterated a number of times that she wanted Canva to provide a generous free-level product that was easy for non-designers to use. She suggested that this drove the company’s organic growth in users, who felt they had had their creative potential unlocked. “People are not made to feel special,” said Perkins, “and software makes people feel dumb.” The suggestion that Canva makes people special might be overegging the pudding a bit. Still, maybe if we substitute “special” for “capable”, “in control”, or “creative”, we might get a bit closer to the actual value it provides its customers. All of which begs the question, what have you done to make your customer feel special lately?
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New business models breed new crimes. One eye-opening session I attended was Streaming Thieves: The Secret Network Stealing Billions from Artists. Hacker-turned-fraud catcher Andrew Batey talked about his work in identifying streaming fraud. This is where bad actors generate millions of streams of songs by fake artists from fake accounts to generate real money. Wired estimates that in 2021, around 3 billion fake streams took place on popular music platforms – so the mind boggles as to what that number is now. This matters because the money fraudsters deplete the pool of funds available to artists take out of the system, and so Spotify, YouTube, et al. become a haven for organised crime – and amateurs chancing their arms.
Then another problem was highlighted by an attendee who works as a music agent. She pointed out that her fledgling artists are frequently kicked off Spotify and other platforms because they are suspected of being bots. Batey said that one way to identify fake accounts is that they don’t have a playing pattern like real people; apparently, our Spotify habits are as distinctive as a fingerprint. But here’s the thing: AI bots are learning to mimic human behaviour and disguise their “listening habits”, making them harder to catch. Which leads me too…
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The AI industry wants you to stop worrying and love AI. AI was a major theme topic of conversation at SXSW, and a lot of discussion was about how we interact with AI and how it becomes increasingly difficult to discern AI from humans. Founder and CEO of games hardware maker Razer, Min-Liang Tan, for example, talked about how gamers will soon have the option of playing against AI players. And although AI has already started mimicking artists, Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau from MIT Technology Review pointed to tech-based countermeasures such as Nightshade and Glaze, which help protect artists’ work and their individual styles from use in generative AI models.
However, it was a smaller session with representatives from Dell and Microsoft that brought home to me how the use of AI will be normalised within our lives relatively soon. New laptops are coming to the market with neural processing units (NPUs) and bespoke chips to handle AI applications. These will work in tandem with AI assistance programs like Co-pilot. So, it’s in these companies’ interests for us to feel comfortable about AI. Which is why Microsoft recently released a Responsible AI Transparency Report, and why they want us to feel relaxed about data security, energy use and a whole lot of other issues. Because the next computer you buy will probably be AI-enabled.
Those are just a few of the things I picked up at SXSW this year. If you want to start a conversation about any of them, I’m always up for a chat, so hit me up.
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Resources
- Sharpe Advisory’s own Top Five Financial Indicators for Not-For-Profits is still one of the most popular documents we’ve produced. Download it here, and find other resources we’ve published over the years here.
- The Arts Well Being Collective has a range of fantastic resources about looking after yourself as you’re busy making creative business. Check out their work here.
- If you, like me are a proud Excel nerd, Kenji Explains is a great YouTube channel for tips and tricks.
- AFTRS has two seasons of their Lumina podcast available online, about the art and value of storytelling. Lots of interest to sample here.
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Things to do this month
- When was the last time you refreshed your HR policies and procedures? In the work-from-home era these need considering on a regular basis. Dust them off and give them a polish.
- Which of your contacts have you been meaning to catch up with? We’re quick running out of year, so schedule those networking meet-ups now.
- Got three jobs this year you’re really proud of? Pull them all together into some quick and cheerful content and get it out online. Don’t overthink it – just get the word out.
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