Hello again from Austin! On Monday night, reporter Katie Richards slept on a concert hall stage filled with 150 twin beds as part of Beautyrest’s sleep experience—composer Max Richter performed during attendees’ REM cycles—and that’s not even the weirdest thing that's happened here at SXSW. "I don’t think many people expect us to be here,” said Warren Kornblum, CMO of Serta Simmons Bedding. “We’ve been around for 150 years and we have something like 800 patents on mattresses. We are really into innovation, and SXSW is all about innovation. So what better place to do it than here?" Think about that for a second: A 150-year-old brand hauled 150 twin beds to Austin for a bunch of sweaty, tired SXSW attendees to sleep on. That’s not something you’d expect from a legacy brand. But the quest for eyeballs has made companies more willing to remake their identities, and that’s encouraging and enlightening. Speaking of enlightening, Hearst CCO Joanna Coles joined Melinda Gates' keynote to talk about workplace culture and got real about what it's like to discuss diversity at festivals year after year. When you champion inclusion in the workplace, you “always end up reminding people that there's a shortfall in diversity,” she said. “And it’s exhausting to always go back to that issue [without seeing change].” Almost every festival I’ve covered in my four years at Adweek has included a panel about the need to shake up advertising's "boy’s club." With the launch of Time's Up Advertising, you have to wonder, will the conversation change next year? A word on brand safety YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced here that the company will work with Wikipedia to ensure there's context for conspiracy videos on the platform. "If there’s something that’s happening in the world and there’s an important news event, we want to be delivering the right set of information, and so we felt like there was a responsibility for us to do that, and for us to do that well," she said during her keynote. "That’s what we [did] a year ago, but I think what we’ve seen is that it’s not enough—there still continues to be a lot of misinformation out there." - Kristina Monllos, Senior Editor |
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