Luke Hawkins Spikes Asia Diary: Day One
Clemenger BBDO Sydney creative director Luke Hawkins is in Singapore sitting on the Film, Print & Publishing, Print & Outdoor Craft jury at Spikes Asia. Here’s his report on Day One of the judging.
I arrived in Singapore last night to a city buzzing with Formula One fever. After an eventful journey to the hotel involving several road blocks and having to navigate my way on foot through a huge underground carpark using google maps with one bar of signal strength, I managed to catch the last half hour of the race from my balcony. An experience which can be best summed up as loud, fast and pretty fucking awesome.
Day one of judging starts in the gym. Despite the ungodly hour there’s already another guy in there who’s giving the Elliptical trainer a good run for its money. I soon recognise him as our jury president Tony Granger and introduce myself. We exchange sweaty handshakes and proceed to do a bit of pre-judging bonding over some F1 chat and a few chin ups. As you do.
After breakfast we gather in the hotel lobby and are welcomed by Terry Savage before breaking off into our respective juries. Tony Granger outlines the importance of looking for simple human truths that create relevance and meaning. And ideas that are so strong they seem almost inevitable. He also stresses the importance of being both respectful and fair. We all work hard to produce work we feel is of award show calibre, so it’s a point that resonates.
From there we break off into two groups for the first round of film judging. We see the online film and content entries that made it through preliminary online judging and precede to vote again on those. Then it’s onto TV and Cinema. There are plenty of entries to get through and it’s good to see Australia and New Zealand well represented.
In terms of trends there are 3 clear winners:
1. Pulling on the heartstrings is the new black.
2. Real world experiments are all the rage, and often come hand in hand with trend number 1.
3. Everyone loves coffee. We’ve seen ads for coffee brands. Ads not for coffee brands but set in cafes. Ads for tech brands featuring baristas. And coffee used in life metaphors, analogies and tropes. Go figure.
Once we’d wrap up the film judging we break for lunch then get stuck into the first round of Print & Publishing and Print & Outdoor craft. Again, there are plenty of entries to get through and it’s nice to see that despite digital playing a part in just about everything we do these days, there is still a place for more traditional print.
Tomorrow the shortlists will be revealed and the discussions will begin. I can’t wait.