Ron Samuel’s diary day 2: highlights from the Emergence Creative Festival in Margaret River
Day two gets down to business for Ron Samuel from Cooch Creative, Perh who is currently down in the Margaret River wine region attending the inaugural Emergence Creative Festival. Samuel (pictured far left with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai) is writing a daily diary for Campaign Brief.
When you start the day with breakfast at beautiful Gnarabup Beach your expectations are high for the rest of the day, even though some of the delegates had problems ’emerging’ from the previous night, it was well attended.
I always come to events like this looking for value not inspiration. By value I mean learning new things, exchanging knowledge, market intelligence, discovering trends or anything else that will add value to our business.
The venue was Leeuwin Estate, lovely as always. The first speaker was Bill Tai the sponsored kite surfing venture capitalist from Silicon Valley and he was definitely a highlight.
He has built a community of start-up digital companies from people attracted to his Mai Tai networking event in Maui which attracts kite surfers and start-up folk who get together and kite surf. Some of these companies have become hugely successful.
He said that he is now having more success investing smaller amounts in lots of smaller companies rather than a big lump in one or two.
Part of this is attributed to the speed at which digital technology is defining what will happen next so you need to spread your bets. He discussed how important it was to learn from failure and to keep failing until you get it right. Easy to say if you’re not going to lose your house.
He’s sharp, fit, successful and seems to have blended lifestyle and business very well. I don’t get much work done when I’m surfing with my mates.
The failure theme carried through to the panel discussion on creativity and innovation except the advice was bit more succinct – if you’re going to fail do it quickly. The importance of developing a creative culture was highlighted, something that seems to have been embraced more by our clients than our industry.
The panel was constructive in its advice saying that creativity needs to be supported by process that leads to commercialisation, in other words you’ve got to know where the money is going to come from before you start something.
Next up was Adam Ferrier from Naked who was filling in for Agnello Dias from Taproot India, who had a nasty case of the measles. I wish Agnello all the best but Adam was great. His topic was changing behaviour, which is what we are trying to do much of the time. He was engaging, insightful and left everyone with an idea of where to start. He was the standout speaker of the day for me.
The digital debate panel was interesting but it would have been nice for Othman Laraki, ex VP of Twitter, to have his own space to talk more about Twitter and how they actually make money from all those Tweets.
Perth’s own Mark Loveridge from Adaptor shared his view of the future saying that IP is becoming more valuable than the process used to create it due to commoditisation of the technology. In other words everyone will be able to make stuff so what you make is more valuable than what you made it with.
Adam Ferrier joined the Social Mapping panel after lunch, which I think, saved it from drowning in ambiguity.
The band panel discussion, later in the evening, about music licensing showcased some of the outstanding musical talent down here with hands on advice on how to get heard.
It would have been good to have given this task to the social media experts at the beginning of the festival and see how they fared by the end, nothing like a live case history to prove a point.