Every June, SXSW brings together some of the world’s most influential thinkers across technology, creativity, business and culture. This year, our team spent time exploring the conversations, showcases and experiences emerging from the inaugural SXSW London, looking beyond individual talks to identify the broader shifts shaping brands and marketing.
Four key trends stood out among the presentations and showcases. SXSW London didn’t introduce these ideas, but it did something equally valuable: it brought them together. Across conversations spanning AI, gaming, immersive experiences, music and design, the same themes kept surfacing. They point to four shifts that we believe are already reshaping how brands are built, experienced and remembered.
1. Brands Are No Longer Built. They Are Experienced.
For decades, branding was largely a game of recognition.
The objective was consistency: a distinctive logo, a memorable identity, a clear tone of voice and a set of values that could be repeated across every touchpoint. Success was measured by whether people recognised your brand.
Today, that model is evolving. The strongest brands are no longer defined solely by what they say or how they look, but by the worlds they create around them.
This idea surfaced repeatedly across conversations about AI, gaming and immersive experiences. Journey’s David Bowie: You’re Not Alone transformed an archive into an immersive environment where visitors experienced Bowie’s creative philosophy rather than simply learning about his life. R/GA explored how brands are evolving into intelligent systems capable of generating decisions, interactions and experiences. Meanwhile, The GTA Effect examined how digital worlds have become social spaces where communities don’t simply consume culture—they actively extend it.
What connects these examples is a fundamental shift in thinking. Brands are moving from communication to participation. Campaigns are designed to provoke and persuade. Worlds are designed to be inhabited, explored and ultimately made our own.
This has significant implications for brand strategy. Products, retail, digital experiences, sound, physical environments, communities and services can no longer be developed in isolation. Together, they form a connected ecosystem that shapes how people experience a brand.
Recognition still matters. But increasingly, success is measured by something deeper: whether people choose to return, immerse themselves and become part of the story.
The brands creating the greatest long-term value aren’t simply communicating messages. They’re creating worlds people want to inhabit.
What does this mean for us? It means asking different questions at the very start of a project. Rather than focusing solely on how a brand looks or what it says, we’re increasingly exploring how people experience it across every touchpoint. The challenge is no longer building brands that are recognised or campaigns that are remembered. It’s creating brand worlds that people choose to enter, experience and shape over time.
2. Emotion Is Becoming Marketing’s Most Valuable Metric
Marketing has traditionally optimised for visibility. Reach. Impressions. Engagement. Share of voice. The underlying assumption has been simple: if enough people see the message, the message will work. Increasingly, that assumption is changing. Across immersive experiences, exhibitions and brand conversations, one idea kept resurfacing:
Information creates awareness. Emotion creates memory.
The David Bowie experience demonstrated this beautifully. Rather than presenting a chronological biography, the creators designed an emotional journey. Visitors left remembering how the experience made them feel, not simply what they had learned.
The same thinking emerged in discussions around multi-sensory branding. Design influences behaviour, but sound, movement, space and atmosphere shape emotion. Visual identity creates recognition. Sensory identity creates memory.
This represents a subtle but important shift. Traditional marketing asks: What do we want people to know? Experience design asks: What do we want people to feel?
It’s also changing how experiences are designed. Instead of chasing increasingly personalised interactions, many creators are investing in shared experiences that bring people together. Concerts, immersive exhibitions and public installations succeed because they create collective emotional moments that become part of our cultural memory.
As audiences become increasingly resistant to interruption, emotional resonance becomes more valuable than attention alone. The challenge for marketers is no longer simply getting noticed. It’s creating moments people remember.
For our clients, this shifts the conversation from outputs to outcomes. It’s no longer just about creating communications that reach people, it’s about creating experiences that leave a lasting impression. The brands that build emotional memory will always outperform those that simply generate awareness.
3. AI Won’t Replace Creativity. It Will Redefine It.
For much of the past two years, the conversation around AI has centred on one question, Will AI replace creative people? Increasingly, that feels like the wrong question.
The more interesting conversation is how AI can remove friction, expand creative possibilities and allow people to spend more time on the work that requires genuine human thinking.
This perspective emerged repeatedly across discussions with musicians, producers and creative technologists.
Rather than treating AI as a replacement for creativity, they described it as the next generation of creative tools, joining samplers, synthesisers, digital workstations and editing software as technologies that expand what artists can achieve.
The real opportunity isn’t producing more content. It’s removing the repetitive tasks that slow creativity down. And as execution becomes easier, something unexpected happens. Judgement becomes more valuable. Taste becomes more valuable. Originality becomes more valuable.
AI can generate options. It can accelerate workflows. It can support execution. But meaning, imagination and creative direction remain fundamentally human.Perhaps the biggest shift isn’t technological at all. It’s strategic. The future is unlikely to belong to pure technologists or pure creatives. It will belong to hybrids, people who combine creative instinct with technological fluency.
AI won’t replace creativity. It will redefine where creativity creates value.
For Studio La Plage, this means embracing AI where it improves efficiency, while doubling down on the capabilities that create real value for clients: strategic thinking, creativity, judgement and human insight. Technology should enhance our work, not define it.
4. Strategy Is Becoming the Competitive Advantage
The rise of AI is also changing the role of brand strategy itself. As generative tools make content easier to produce, the competitive advantage shifts upstream. Positioning matters more. Narrative matters more. Brand architecture matters more. Strategic clarity matters more.
One of the strongest ideas explored by R/GA was the concept of an “Intelligent Brand System”, the idea that brands need more than visual guidelines and messaging frameworks. They need clear principles that help both people and machines understand how the brand behaves, makes decisions and responds to different contexts.
This isn’t about replacing strategy with AI. It’s about recognising that AI amplifies whatever foundations already exist. Strong strategy becomes stronger. Weak strategy becomes more visible. The implication is significant. Future brand systems won’t simply tell people what to do. They’ll provide the logic that enables brands to adapt consistently across channels, experiences and increasingly AI-mediated interactions.
As discovery shifts towards AI assistants, recommendation engines and generative search, clarity becomes a competitive advantage. Brands that lack a clear point of view risk becoming interchangeable, no matter how much content they produce.
In a world where everyone has access to the same tools, differentiation will come less from execution and more from strategic intent.
This reinforces something we’ve believed for a long time: strategy isn’t a stage in the process—it’s the foundation that makes everything else more effective. As technology lowers the barriers to creating content, the brands that stand out will be those with the clearest purpose, strongest positioning and most distinctive point of view.
Taken together, these shifts point to a future where brands need to be more connected, more emotionally resonant and more strategically grounded than ever before. For us, this reinforces the direction we’re already taking with our clients: helping organisations build brands that don’t just communicate, but create meaningful experiences, lasting relationships and long-term competitive advantage.
