My sister graduated college in May and wants to work in advertising, so I gifted her a subscription to Adbusters, the ad-free anti-consumerist magazine. Yes, Iâm a contrarian big brother, or maybe just an asshole, and itâs with that kind of baby-Iâm-an-anarchist chip on my shoulder that last week I walked from the gray damp of Pike Street through the doors of the convention center and into the technicolor world of the Seattle Interactive Conference.
A fixture on the fall calendar for nearly a decade, Seattle Interactive Conference (SIC) is where smart people in this town figure out better ways to sell you stuff, further the distraction machine of the digital era, and otherwise keep your eyeballs glued to screens. The idea mostly made my skin curdle as I side-eyed a program with sessions like âHow B2B Marketers Use Social Media," âGen Z & Millennial Mobile Video Trends,â and âHow Experiences are Redefining Brands.â
The event once aspired to be an Emerald City counterpart to South by Southwest with all of the Austin eventâs tech and media programming but none of its cutting-edge live music. A partnership with Capitol Hill Block Party earlier this decade seems to have fallen by the wayside. Weâll have to leave it to the successor to Upstream (RIP) to get our marquee downtown music festival. At this point SIC has gone all-in on the confluence of technology, branding, and marketing, including several regrettable bookings of AOLâs now-disgraced âdigital prophetâ Shingy, who hopefully will never step foot in Seattle ever again.
Iâm a thirty-something curmudgeon who has no desire to figure out how to make branded content go viral on TikTok, so I studiously avoided SICâs meat and potatoesâthe latest tech trends and how to wield them for marketing supremacyâand hunted out the conferenceâs more tangible fringes.
Two earnest REI employees unpacked how they ditched the fall catalog to launch a new print magazine, Uncommon Path, that landed in my mailbox last month and became dreamy bedside reading. The two Steves behind Microsoftâs in-house media juggernaut Story Labs may have made me well up with a tear or two with the Parkinsons-beating wristband behind Project Emma. A trio of Pacific Northwest brandsâAlaska Airlines, Chateau Ste. Michelle, and Sub Popâtalked about how to go national.
âWe still operate like the little guy, but the only one that hasnât gone bankrupt,â said Katie DâAmato, Alaskaâs brand director. I swelled with pride. How many places have a hometown airline? When I see the lone airplane sporting the iconic Eskimo logo (one that has courted its fair share of controversy over indigenous representation) at BWI Airport near my parentsâ house, I know Iâm on my way home.
Along the way, I let down my guard and realized that as I slung my Mountain Hardware backpack with my Apple laptop over the shoulder of my Brooklyn Industries raincoat, draped over my Bonobos plaid button-down and the jeans I got at Nordstrom down the street, well, all of those were conscious consumer decisions on my part. When I was in college and thought I had beat the brands at their own game by shopping at logo-less American Apparel, the lack of a polo player or swoosh on my shirt was just its own logo. Checkmate.
Sub Pop vice-president Megan Jasper further put my mind at ease when she candidly admitted, âIn our world, itâs very easy to sell out and Sub Pop has sold out so many times already it probably doesnât really matter.â
I still hoofed it a few blocks up to Victrola for my midday caffeine fix in lieu of the complimentary Starbucks on offerâbecause friends donât let friends drink Starbucks and no amount of pumpkin spice latte is going to convince me that theyâre just a friendly local coffee shopâbefore playing around with Cuboid, the latest creation of Seattle digital artist Julia Bruk, one of the brains behind the Borealis festival of video projection mapping and light art.
First premiered at On the Boards, the life-size fabric cube with a dancer inside responds to the tactileâyou touching the sides of the cubeâand the digitalâyou sending emojis to its Facebook Live stream. I wasnât blown away, but I was mildly charmed. New forms of digital art, right in our backyard. Finally, the tech bloom yielding aesthetic fruit. I started to walk away with a smile. Then I overheard someone ask Bruk, âSo how can use this thing for brands?â The smile gave way to a grimace.