PR takeaways from SXSW 2025

SXSW took over Austin, Texas, for its 38^th year. Stars like Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey and Cookie Monster all visited to promote new products; companies staged elaborate activations to grab attention, from free blowouts in a makeshift street salon and cutting-edge digital art and free Dubai chocolate.

But inside, many of the panels geared toward PR and brand professionals focused not on the large-scale and flashy, but instead on the personal and even intimate.

“I don’t just want to know that you’re looking for your next TV — I want to know that you’re looking for a TV because you like watching sports, and I want to know that you are the most passionate about the New York Giants so that I can start showing you content about how the Samsung TV is their best Giants experience,” said Allison Stransky, CMO of Samsung, during a panel.

That approach of combining big data with individual desires played out throughout the conference, from a keynote with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber to discussions on the use of AI in journalism.

Here’s what it means for your PR practice.

Data drives everything

It’s old hat to say how important data is in marketing, PR and communications of all kinds. But the new twist is what can be achieved with data.

“The tools are really catching up to the marketers’ aspirations,” Stransky said. “We’re reaching this point where we are going to be able to achieve the next level of hyper-personalization.”

At Samsung, the big data team sits within the corporate marketing department, which also includes internal and external communications, to better integrate those insights into various campaigns.

“We know that data is our gift, and our responsibility as marketers to understand you and treat you the way that you want to be treated,” Stransky said.

All that data, however, can be difficult to sort through. That’s where AI comes in.

Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager for AI strategy at the Associated Press, discussed how AI can help their reporting better operate at scale. When reporters wanted to review 100 podcasts featuring new FBI director Kash Patel, reviewing them by hand would have been an onerous task. AI helped them quickly look for key phrases, which then could be reviewed by humans.

Within big data, personalization is more important than ever

With all that massive data driving AI and other automated delivery systems, it can be easy to lose sight of the actual people communicators are speaking to. Over and over again, speakers emphasized the importance of humans having control: either in how their own data is being used or fed to them, or in the oversight of AI use.

Graber repeatedly hammered on Bluesky’s point of differentiation: Users’ ability to curate their own feeds to their precise desires, rather than feeling at the whim of an algorithm.

“When you sign up to Bluesky, you get two default feeds: Following and Discover,” Graber said. “One’s algorithmic, one’s chronological, but then you have a marketplace of over 50,000 feeds that you can choose from. That means you can install a feed that’s just science posts or just cat pictures, if you want to see that, and there’s many you can choose from. If you don’t see what you like, you can create one.” She also talked in-depth about the ability for users to filter posts they don’t want to see or even block entire portions of Bluesky. It’s clear that customization is a point of differentiation for this fast-growing platform.

Brian Irving, chief marketing officer at Lyft, called the ride-share platform a “real-time personalization engine.”

“We started with the product experience — ensuring that this really dynamic content and personalized experience comes through in the journey for both the rider and the driver… making sure we’re not just giving the right offer at the right time, but the right message at the right time,” Irving said.

And personalization is also key in oversight of AI, including taking responsibility. All the journalists on the AI in journalism panel adamantly proclaimed their personal responsibility to take ownership over any machine-generated insights they use for stories.

“We do not use AI to write our articles,” insisted Rubina Fillion, associated editorial director for AI initiatives at the New York Times. “That’s a misconception that some folks have, and journalists are ultimately responsible for everything that we publish. That means that if there is a correction because an AI tool has made a mistake, we are not going to blame the AI tool — that is on us, that is our fault.”​

The future of social media

Beyond personalization, an undercurrent of uncertainty ran through discussions of social media. Graber expanded on her long-standing stance that Bluesky is “billionaire proof,” unlike rivals X and Meta, due to its open-source nature. If Bluesky as a company begins to do things users don’t like, they can simply customize their experience to avoid those excesses – or even break away entirely.

A panel on the challenges of the creator economy quickly dismissed the belief that TikTok will disappear in the United States, believing that fans and creators will rally to save the app. But they did note that the app may not be as powerful as it seems – one speaker noted that at events, lines are around the block for YouTube stars, but TikTokers rarely draw massive followings in real life.

But there was broad agreement that influencers will only grow in importance in coming years, once again bringing that personal touch to an impersonal digital world.

“There’s something even more magical about giving the trust in your brand to a partner, like a creator, and letting them make their human decision,” Stransky said. “You work with them because there’s trust and love and relationship and all of those things. But at the end of the day, they have their own voice, and it’s their own voice that is also critical to your brand experience.”​

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.