Chris Andrawes @ Emergence: Day 1

Longtail Art Director Chris Andrawes has headed south for Emergence 2016 and reports for Campaign Brief.

Emergence-2016-proper kicked off at beautiful Willy Bay winery with coffee, ohh so much coffee.

Our first keynote speaker was José Miguel Sokoloff who took us on a roller coaster ride of amazing world changing advertising that he has worked on.

José described the advertising world very philosophically saying “advertising is the price you have to pay for having a lame product … we can’t make the product better, we have a soft power to make the brand mean something meaningful”.

He then demonstrated this with several case studies including JetBlue’s ‘Reach Across the Aisle’ and Columbia’s ‘Operation Christmas’.

After that solid philosophical start the second speaker for the day was ex-Perth girl Zena Loxton, who made extra doubly sure that everyone was well aware that her name is spelt with a ‘z’ and not an ‘x’.

Zena’s whole talk revolved around “going the wrong way”, which included her initial career move to London where the weather is terrible compared to balmy Perth.

She then talked about historical examples of people intentionally going against the grain, like a young Debbie Harry who announced herself as a sex object and Banksy’s Dismaland, which subverted modern Disney culture.

Zena proposed a mission statement for the entire media and advertising community: “Don’t pollute. Everything we create needs to have value.”

To achieve this goal she suggested 5 steps to follow with our own work:

• Does the world need to see this?

• Does it have value?

• Think like a publisher

• Story is queen

• Make friends with your media.

Next up was Ram Castillo …all over again. Given I’d already heard this talk I’ll let you read yesterday’s entry rather than writing it all over again.

We rounded out the day’s keynotes with an incredibly interesting panel discussion on the music industry. The resounding sentiment from this discussion was “fuck the x-factor”.

There was a lot of good banter in this panel, but some quotes in particular stood out to me because of their application to the advertising industry, like “Is it more important to write good creative songs or to just advertise any song?”

We wrapped up the learning stuff part of the day with a workshop on documentary film techniques by our friend from earlier, Zena Loxton.

This particular session was great because we got to watch movies and no one doesn’t like watching movies.

Zena talked about how documentary film techniques can make even fictional drama films more interesting and engaging to viewers, I agree.

The day wrapped up with an ridiculously freezing cold short film festival at Xanadu. I’m going to be honest here and admit that I didn’t actually see any short films at the short film festival, but I’ve been assured that they were there.

Now well-rested, fed and enthused, bring on day 2!