Claire Davidson on the day one seminars at the 2014 AdStars Festival in Busan, South Korea

The AdStars festival officially commenced today with delegates from around the world rolling in to attend the three-day event.  The next few days will see the global creative communications industries share their ideas and campaigns, with work entered and also discussed on the stages during the seminars and speaker sessions.

AdStars is hosted by Busan Metropolitan City; not only to support the domestic advertising industry, but also to garner a foothold internationally.  This has well and truly proven to be the case with 12,591 entries from 62 countries coming in this year – now making AdStars the biggest advertising festival in Asia.  This is a huge achievement for a festival that began only seven years ago, in 2008.  This week we judged all 1,666 impressive finalists.  I feel like we all need a cup of tea and a lie down.

The slogan for this year is “Share Creative Solutions, Change The World” with “convergence” being the central theme.  AdStars focuses on sharing diverse creative solutions around the world, for the betterment of culture and humanity.  We’re also being asked this week to think in detail about how we, in our professions in this industry, contribute to people through advertising.

The seminars kicked off today with “Open The Door To China”.  Throughout the next three days here at AdStars the spotlight will be squarely on China, with discussions ranging from exploring new Chinese trends, to how we can make it in the Chinese market and even seeing the path to success for the South Korean cosmetics industry to enter the Chinese cosmetics market.  We already know that South Korea is the number one holiday destination for Chinese women (with the USA the top pick for men).

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