SINGAPORE “It gets better, better, and better,” was how Lions Festivals Chairman Terry Savage described the 2014 edition of the Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity, held in Singapore’s Suntec City Convention Center. For this year’s Festival, Spikes boasts not just one, but two brand new categories in the form of Healthcare and Innovation, as well as an extra day to give added focus and attention to the judging, seminars and exhibits that have come to symbolize Asia’s foremost festival.
“It’s the most important show in the region,” Savage shared with adobo on opening day. “But what people must never forget is people aren’t just seeing Spikes as a regional event, they’re looking at it from a global level because they clearly want to understand what is happening and who is excellent in the fastest growing region in the planet.” Indeed, at the time of this writing, the 90-strong jury comprised of international judges is hard at work, weighing the creative merits (or lack thereof) of a record-setting 4,984 entries from 22 countries.
Starting the festival off was the irreverently lively duo of LuckySparks founders Henry Chan and Ssong Yang and, who shared how their Taiwan/Brooklyn-based production house was able to make its mark (and make a difference) with their “F*ck It!” mindset to content creation.
AKQA CCO Rei Inamoto played to a packed house with his talk, “Design for the Future”, which spoke to the necessity of creating with an eye towards longevity, citing classic Roman architecture, fine cuisine and Michael Jordan’s image as examples.
“In order to be the best, you have to endure…I don’t know all the answers,” the star-shirted creative told his audience, “But I do know I have questions I like to ask.”
Noontime became screening time for the Asian premiere of Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Directors Showcase. The Showcase, originally presented at Cannes, highlights the best and the brightest from not-necessarily-young directors, but ones whose work is relatively new and worthy of notice.
Vizeum APAC CEO Kristian Barnes introduced his agency’s seminar, “Two Kids in a Garage”, wherein he yielded the floor to the types of trend-bucking entrepreneurs who were changing the face of modern industry. Speaking were Asli Golli’s Saim Siddiqui, and FaceRecog’s Muhd Amrullah.
The former’s “Fight Fake Pharma” goes on the offensive against counterfeit drugs, while the latter created an application with numerous potential marketing and health-related applications. The third young entrepreneur, Astro Scale’s Nobu Okada, was unable to attend, as he was presenting his ‘Clean the Cosmos’ initiative at NASA in the United States.
Bates CHI & Partners CEO David Mayo was up next, moderating a panel discussion on what the advertising industry could learn from Hollywood’s new “collaboration” model. Accompanying Mayo onstage were The&Partnership’s Johnny Hornby and Hollywood producer Gabrielle Kelly.
Joining the trio on the big screen via Skype was Marvel Comic’s Larry Hama. The ersatz quartet went over the pros and cons of traditional linear agency workflows versus Marvel’s (cinematic) method of involving all collaborators from the conceptual stage.
Delivering an appropriately entertaining talk on the topic, “Presentations that Zag” was BBH China CCO Johnny Tan, who immediately pointed out the fallacy in assuming that advertising practitioners are naturally persuasive. “I’ve seen so many good ideas just die because of bad presentations,” said Tan, before sharing that one of the key factors was length, while stressing that the shortest, most effective presentations were the ones that involved the most preparation.
The Day One seminars were capped of by documentary filmmaker and internet sensation Casey Neistat. Neistat, who has achieved a ravenous following for his online videos (such as his piece on how easy it is to steal a bike in New York), reached a whole new level of fame earlier this year for his maverick reallocations of production funds (from the likes of Nike and 20th Century Fox to shoot inspirational projects that quickly went viral.
Cinime sponsored this year’s traditional free-flowing opening cocktails, where delegates, speakers and exhibitors alike rubbed shoulders and blew off steam in preparation for the week ahead. Spikes Asia 2014 was officially underway.
