SXSW: Personal Panel Rules from FCB Chicago’s Jennifer Asai

Highlights from day 2 of SXSW with your host (and strategic analyst) Jennifer Asai.

Okay, so here are my personal panel rules for the day:

- Avoid buzzwords. Does the title of the session include ‘big data’, ‘millennials’, or ‘bespoke’? (To be fair, that last one was relatively new to me, but has quickly gotten old). Maybe look for an alternative or backup option, something a little more narrow in focus or topic.

- Don't be afraid to go outside your lane. Do you work with data? (Yes). Often? (Yes). At an advertising agency? (Also yes). You should go to some panels that focus on data, or have an agency audience in mind. You should also go to some sessions that have (seemingly) nothing to do with either of those. Sessions for content publishers and journalists, meet-ups for food entrepreneurs – anything that can get you out of your comfort zone and into a new perspective. 

- At some point, feed yourself. Food truck optional; tacos or BBQ mandatory.

So how'd the day go? In the AM, I heard from speakers from a Texas history museum who launched a social content curation program to raise awareness and visitation. I also got to feel like an advertising spy among (mostly) journalists and editors, discussing data-driven story creation and optimization with speakers from NPR and Refinery29. Both sessions gave me quite a few notes and ideas to take back to the team on how lessons in data strategy from other very different industries can help inform the ad work we do for our clients.

In the afternoon, I heard an interesting presentation on whether you can trust user-generated content  and reviews (verdict: you can... in some cases... Like this guest-written blog post).

I also sat in on a great panel with several tech companies in the food space, where the discussion centered around how they are using and building insights off of data collected from sources like restaurant menus and recipe searches. Favorite odd fact of the day: compared to the rest of the country, Texas menus are 2X more likely to have a burger described as ‘healthy’, which correlates to the stat that I am 25X more likely to never order any burger described that way.

Jennifer Asai is a strategic analyst at FCB Chicago