Now on its second year, the Creative Summit returned with yet another roster of high-profile speakers and clients. Ready to share their insight on what it takes to “Engage Tomorrow’s Audience,” the esteemed speakers included (but were not limited to) George Lois, Nick Law, Ted Royer, Melody Lee, Rich Tu, and Christine Lane.
NEW YORK – Now on its second year, the Creative Summit returned with yet another roster of high-profile speakers and clients. Ready to share their insight on what it takes to “Engage Tomorrow’s Audience,” the esteemed speakers included (but were not limited to) George Lois, Nick Law, Ted Royer, Melody Lee, Rich Tu, and Christine Lane.
George Lois, acclaimed not only for Papert Koenig Lois but his covers for Esquire magazine (now preserved at a permanent exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art) discussed his love for traditional media in sketching. “I’ve always worked with a pencil,” Lois recalled, “So those drawings [the Esquire cover sketches] were a real find. I had boxes and boxes of my archives and a cabinet full of stuff shoved in a warehouse in Long Island. So, when they reached CCNY and they uncovered the sketches it was an amazing moment. If I’m honest, I hadn’t looked at the drawings since the day that I did them!”
R/GA Vice Chairman and Chief Creative Officer Nick Law, in his keynote on Tomorrow’s Creative Teams, stressed the team’s importance behind the work – that the work itself would not exist if it were not for the team behind it. “None of the [campaigns] could be done without the intersection of the story and the system,” Law noted.
Recently lauded for his work with Johnsonville Sausage, Ted Royer, Chief Creative Officer of Droga5, touches upon in his talk A Campaign Made the Jacksonvile Way, what motivates him in crafting his campaigns. “One of the most fun things about this business is not to make something up about a company or product or service,” Royer affirmed, “but find the truth of it.”
In her talk on Rebuilding an Iconic American Brand, Cadillac’s Brand Marketing Director Melody Lee expounds on re-establishing a quintessential brand in the competition-saturated market. “If you can’t win the battle, you have to change the battleground,” Lee asserts, “if [our competitors] are impressive, let’s be irresistible.”
Rich Tu, designer at NIKE, recounted in Diversity and Storytelling Through Design his experiences as a man of color in the industry, and how these shaped his design thinking. “I believe myself to be a storyteller through my work,” Tu declared. Furthermore, the designer stressed how campaigns that make waves acknowledge the past and people’s vast lived experiences. “If we want to aim towards permanence,” Tu remarked, “we have to acknowledge history.”
McCann SVP Executive Producer Christine Lane’s talk on #FearlessGirl: a Story of Innovation served as a reminder that campaigns are works of art, themselves. “It’s not easy,” Lane recalled, noting how the work had inspired everyone, “but it’s worth it.”
This year’s Creative Summit at Creative Week was held May 8-12 at the Conrad Hotel in New York City.
