Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity 2015 opens

SINGAPORE – It’s Spikes Asia’s 29th year of honoring creative excellence across Asia Pacific. The three-day festival is being held at Suntec Exhibition and Convention Centre in Suntec City, Singapore.

The festival received more than 4,000 entries across 18 categories this year, with a noticeable growth in the Radio and Film Craft categories.

The finalists for Design, Media, Outdoor, Print, Promo & Activation, PR, Direct and Healthcare have been announced, with the winners to be revealed on the awards ceremony on Friday.

The festival’s inspiring seminars rolled out today, starting with a discussion on creating content that matters on Youtube by Gursimranjeet Singh Khamba, a comedian and member of the group All India Bakchod.

“There is potential in using Youtube as a platform to create social engagement and to reach out to younger people who share the same sentiment and feelings about issues.” –Gursimranjeet Singh Khamba

BBDO Asia Pacific’s Arthur Tsang and Hans Vito-Lopez tackled the relevance of aspiration branding and storytelling for luxury items especially in China and Asia.

“One’s social standing does not depend on wealth alone. Even if you’re poor, you can be aspirational.” –Arthur Tsang, BBDO Beijing

Brands have been using Facebook as a marketing tool but as this social network grows bigger and bigger, Head of Creative Shop Fergus O’hare shared how the social media giant can be optimized to reach not only bigger but targeted audience.

“If you stick great stuff to a (Facebook) wall, you can do amazing things and probably even change the world.” –Fergus O’Hare, Head of Creative Shop, Facebook Asia

Bates CHI & Partners meanwhile presented their CEO David Mayo like we’ve never seen him before, on a hot seat! Together with six millennials from all over Asia, they talked about the importance of recognizing the potentials and contributions of the young professionals in the industry who are the bosses of tomorrow.

“Creativity is changing. It’s no longer hard sell.” –Duong Tran, Young Professional from Bates CHI Vietnam

DDB Asia Pacific Director and pioneer of HDSLR filmmaking Vincent Laforet inspired the audience by sharing his story of a series of accidental success that resulted in breakthrough ways of shooting films and aerial photographs.

There’s more where all these came from and we’re in store for more inspirational seminars tomorrow by AKQA, Google, Twitter, BBC and more.