Cool merch, the WBD deal, and AI forever: What we’re expecting from SXSW

To the marketers, filmmakers, creators, and AI enthusiasts headed to South by Southwest, howdy!

I’m headed to the annual festival in Austin, Texas, for the first time this year, and it’s already shaping up to be a fun few days. I will be making every effort to get into Steven Spielberg’s keynote session and live podcast taping of The Big Picture—a first-time event that Claudette Godfrey, SXSW’s VP of film and TV, told me made her stop and think, “Damn, this is my job.”

Speaking of inaugural happenings, SXSW is introducing its first-ever filmmaker’s jacket, made in partnership with the plastic-free clothing brand Unless Collective. The mechanic’s jacket, featuring a bespoke design, will be initially available to filmmakers whose work is premiering at the festival as part of a limited, 350-item run, with more released for additional crew and production members at a later date, Godfrey said.

The festival’s film and TV team has wanted to create a jacket for many years, but Godfrey said the right partner hadn’t emerged until Unless Collective came along.

“Our whole Unless proposition is like, how can we scale this regenerative idea?” Tara Moss, CMO at Unless, told me. “We’re not trying to patent the lack of plastic. We want storytellers. We want creatives. We want the cutting edge of innovators to adopt this and scale it across different businesses, or even help us out with storytelling.”

Having an eye-catching jacket isn’t bad marketing for SXSW, either. While Godfrey said the jackets will help filmmakers spot each other in the crowds, the jackets’ design will eventually be expanded to other merch available to the larger public. Who doesn’t love a walking advertisement with cultural cachet?

Merger of the moment

If I were a betting woman—and Polymarket is making it so easy to be one these days!—I’d bet that a top talking point this week will be the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal—and Taylor Shaw-Omachonu, film lead at Kickstarter, is right there with me. She’s been thinking about how the potential acquisition will affect independent storytelling, enthusiasm for new projects, and the process of distribution, a major obstacle faced by the filmmakers she works with.

“Toward the end of last year, we were seeing an uptick in original scripts being picked up,” Shaw-Omachonu said. “But it still didn’t and doesn’t really change the game for new and underrepresented voices.”

This year, Kickstarter is the presenting sponsor for the festival’s narrative feature competition, and it will have three films premiering and 37 alumni participating at the event. Shaw-Omachonu said the company wants to become a platform known for supporting filmmakers through distribution, not just in the fundraising phase.

She also had a few words of advice for creatives staring down industry uncertainty. “There’s been a lot of instability in the industry for years now,” Shaw-Omachonu said. “We don’t know how long this ride is going to be rocky. So if you want to tell stories, do that. And the way to do that is to take it into your own hands. Create, invite your audience into that process.”

The AI of it all

Beyond the movie magic, SXSW is set to be chock-full of programming geared at and hosted by business executives across industries, with a major uniting theme being, to no one’s shock, artificial intelligence.

Hannah Elsakr, VP of GenAI new business ventures at Adobe, is ready for such conversation. She told me via email that the biggest shift in the AI discourse will be moving from curiosity to practicality, with more people exploring and sharing ways to actually implement AI into workflows.

Still, AI at a conference full of creatives probably won’t all be sunshine and rainbows, and Elsakr said apprehension should be met with “real answers, not reassurances.”

“People had similar concerns when digital photography or image-editing software like Photoshop first emerged, and those tools ultimately expanded what artists could do rather than replacing them,” she said. “Ultimately, adoption is about creative choice…But AI is just one part of the workflow. It can generate possibilities, but the story, the taste, and the emotional impact always come from the creator.”

The evolution and convergence of the creator economy and the entertainment industry will also be a major topic, and I will be checking out a panel with Julian Shapiro-Barnum, host of the adorable TikTok web series Recess Therapy, and Jeremy Lowe, vice president of talent and partnership at Dick Clark Productions.

There’s also sessions on marketing to Gen Alpha, modern romance in advertising, and revitalizing retail via the “mall rat”—plus brand activations out the wazoo. I’m packing my best boots made for walking, blasting “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha, and preparing for a weekend of good chit-chat—and hopefully even better movies. I’ll be on the ground through Sunday, so if you see me, please give this first-time SXSW-er a wave or a snack suggestion.