A ranga in a foreign land: Josh Edge’s Spikes Festival of Creativity diary – Day 2
By Josh Edge
Day 2 of the festival, and some of the sheen has worn off what was a very impressive Day 1. At first I thought it might have been a remnant of some great ‘networking’ opportunities that rolled on just a little too far into the night, most involving some combination of crab, Tiger, crab, crab, seafood, Tiger, taxi, Tiger, crab, tequila. But then I woke up to find myself in front of Eric Solomon from YouTube, who appeared to be reading from the script of a disused pitch script from 1997.
There were amazing videos up on screen, yes, but that’s because it’s YouTube. Insights and some learnings would be nice, even if I was blown away by the fact that 1/5 of all internet data traffic is now being absorbed by the 6 billion hours of new content uploaded and watched every month. My ears and eyeballs were also given an early-morning-dubstep massage courtesy of ‘YouTube personality’ Marquese Scott, who you can experience in all his popped/locked glory here.
It actually reminded me that I had totally overlooked the breathtaking (literally, I did a Bill Clinton and refused to inhale) art of another Youtube star, Miyoko Shida Rigolo and her Sanddornbalance performance during yesterday’s Grey Group session (you can see a version of her art here: I’m not sure if it translates well online, without the constant stress of air-conditioning in a giant hall, delegates movements and the bangs and crashes from the Google booth all threatening to derail the performance in a heartbeat. But it was mind-blowing in person.
Anyway, from there it was onto the first forum session of the day, ‘The Body Language of Successful Brands’ from OMD. A media agency talking brand behaviour was a refreshing change of pace, and the points made about consumer’s decision paths were less analytical than I had feared. Basically, no bastard makes purchasing decisions with kind of implied rational thinking process that media companies (and agencies) often credit them with. Guy Hearn noted that a huge laundry detergent client once spent a lot of money asking their customers which was more important to them: cleanliness or whiteness? The answer they eventually came up with was that both were equally important. If things were clean they were probably going to be white, and it’s hard to be white if you’re dirty (unless you’re into some form of body painting). So people are resorting to ‘thin slice’ judgements, they’re not paying attention, and they need consistency from brand behaviours to resonate.
Thenetworkone’s independent agency showcase was another inspiring show of small-scale agencies (full disclosure, I am in one such agency and love it) – especially the amazing ‘People’s Car’ project for Volkswagen from Georg Warga at Goodstein in China. Really inspiring and yet another example of crowd-sourced creative that didn’t dilute the idea – it actually added to it and was completely true to the brand all the way along.
Things then took a decidedly scientific (and creepy) turn with Leo Burnett’s talk ‘Polemic, Dirt, Grime, Dance & Pain’. Steven van der Kruit (left) is one of those dastardly marketing gurus you read about in shadowy Hollywood movies, working for fragrance and branding companies as some kind of cultural soothsayer and absorber of life stuff. His official title is Global Prospective & Trends Director, which basically means that he travels to the top 12 world cities which have been identified as producing 80% of all world cultural trends, relentlessly roaming the streets, doing non-stop interviews with everyone he finds and producing a visual record of up to 30,000 pictures of street culture, fashion, underground trends and everything in-between. Everything created is meticulously tagged and uploaded to a master database, which is used to predict trends up to 5 years before they happen (the necessary product lead-time for many mass-market brands) and, increasingly, to create trends before the street-level culture makers have even had time to think of them. Interestingly, the Asia Pacific Rim region was seen to have 6 of the major 12 towns worldwide in terms of cultural impact, which was a huge increase from previous years and means that Australian literally have access to some of the most important cultural movers and shakers in the world on our doorstep. His top 3 trends for the next 5-10 years? The Human Genome Project (by 2015 we will be able to replicate and start to repair our personal DNA within one day), Humanity (getting back to our humanity, he used London graffiti artist Insa as inspiration), and Galaxy Quest (not the Tim Allen vehicle, but the eventual shift of humanity away from a dying Earth and towards space as an ongoing obsession).
Atifa Silk, Editorial Director of Campaign Asia-Pacific, then chaired a panel of creative leaders from DDB India, JWT and Ninety Nine Percent that threw down a challenge for all creative agencies in describing their role as like a director with a sick patient. In their analogy, clients refusing to do good marketing are like a sick patient refusing to take proper medication doses, and then blaming the doctor when they get sick. Taking it further, they then went on to make the point that a good doctor is staying ahead of the illness, giving preventative health advice, and making sure the patient never sicks in the first place. Timely advice when considering the new role of agencies as ‘always-on’ editorial newsrooms.
Some examples of this type of thinking? Try the Samsung ‘Bridge of Life’ work or Smart Communications ‘Smart Textbooks’ from the Philippines, or the Shareable Coke Can, or Starhub’s ‘The Third Eye Project’.
Anyway, I’ve blown out my word count and I haven’t even mentioned director David Nutter’s talk (Game of Thrones, The X-Files, Supernatural, Sopranos etc etc), Rei Inamoto from AKQA, or David Guerrero’s ‘Crap Ideas Workshop’ (visit crapidea.com for a taste of this fantastically simple tool). Or, for that matter, the four agency party tour bus sponsored by Smirnoff with electro street parties and insanity and… and…
And anyway, that’s why you come to Spikes yourself. Do it next year.
Josh Edge is the Creative Director of Longtail. He likes sunsets and long walks on the beach. This is Josh’s first time at Spikes Asia. You can be relentlessly spammed by Singapore and Perth-related photography by Josh at instagram.com/joshbites or via Flickr at flickr.com/photos/27745483@N07/