AUSTIN, TEX. — The South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin is nothing short of a chaotic jumble of brands and marketers screaming for attention. You can't walk two feet without being offered a free poncho, smartphone charger, or a quick snooze in a nap pod.
One of the biggest marketing presences here is Subway, which is promoting its new pizza-food called the Flatizza. It looks like a cracker with some pizza toppings melted on top of it. We didn't get to try it yet, but we've heard from taste testers that it's not that great.
Subway set up a big booth at the convention center in downtown Austin, right outside the hall where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke via Skype on Saturday. In it, Subway employees strapped brain monitors onto convention-goers and asked them to "think" about the Flatizza. The person who thought the hardest won some swag.
In theory though, the brain monitors can't tell specifically what you're thinking about, according to one of the Subway marketing guys at the booth. Contestants didn't really need to have a Flatizza on their minds to win. They could've thought about "True Detective" theories or their significant others or anything else that got their brain juices flowing.
Anyway, the crowds at the convention center ate it up. Here's what it looked like:
Welcome to the Flatizza booth.
Contestants had to strap on these brainwave monitors.
Then they had to calibrate the devices by thinking about the Subway Flatizza.
Game time! The woman on the right seemed to be giving off more Flatizza vibes than her opponent.
