Chris Andrawes at Emergence: Day 1
Marketforce creative Chris Andrawes is at the 2017 Emergence Creative Festival in Margaret River and reports for Campaign Brief.
Opening day proper of Emergence was dominated by two big sessions with JWT’s Matt Eastwood.
His morning keynote started with the key theme ‘the memory is the message’, which he reinforced by having a violinist and cellist play classical music on the stage next to him as he pointed out “you’ll remember this, and none of what I’ll say”.
Matt’s primary focus was to drill into us that advertising is at its best when it’s a spectacle that people want to engage with. He reaffirmed this by rattling off a bunch of statistics to prove his point, such as less than 1% of millennials say that traditional advertising has any influence on them.
Later in the day after his talk, Matt hosted a casual but informative Q&A style workshop, in which he discussed the processes involved in being a global level creative director.
Led by questions from the group, Matt talked about being glad to start to see the end of the pigeonholing Art Director/Copywriter job titles, instead being excited to look towards teams of creatives that are multi-skilled and from unconventional backgrounds.
Interestingly he also touched briefly on the demise of the single-minded proposition, pointing out that it is no longer the best way to be briefed on a creative job. He pointed out that you’re better off with a good understanding of the business problem and the client themselves.
Matt also talked in-depth about the need for creatives to have an understanding of business management and numbers, especially if they ‘ re going to move up in an agency or begin to understand a client’s business.
Circling back to earlier in the day, Matt’s talk started a theme that recurred throughout the day of ‘moments’ being the key to good modern advertising. This was reaffirmed by Jens Hertzum’s talk entitled ‘What they want is not what they say’.
Jens’ work seems to be focused on making even the smallest budget or brief into an entertainment-packed piece of creative, which is something that it feels like the New Zealand ad industry does so well.
It was interesting to hear how he’d constantly pitched big, crazy creative ideas to seemingly banal briefs – which I think every creative in the world would love to do – including some bizarre but quirky Comedy Channel TV idents involving sausages being pulled out of pants.
With a talk from Christy Dena on trans media audience motivations and a music panel featuring the Birds of Tokyo, the opening day was packed with tidbits of information from creative minds from all over the world. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s talks almost as much as I’m looking forward to seeing where Josh will lose his bag next.
