A ranga in a foreign land: Josh Edge’s Spikes Festival of Creativity diary – Final Day

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Josh in Singapore.jpgby Josh Edge

If there’s one thing you desire after 3 solid days of listening, reading, absorbing, networking and generally cramming your brain with enough neural activity to power a small electrical substation, it’s to  imbibe enough free alcohol to wipe out the same amount of neural activity shortly afterwards. It was with this mission that a large contingent of the advertising talent in Singapore descended on the final day of Spikes.

But first, there was the small matter of absorbing some of the most illuminating (and entertaining) talks of the week from such luminaries as Keith Reinhard, Jose Sokoloff (Lowe Worldwide), Tom Uglow (Google), Sir Jackie Stewart (former F1 champion) and McCann Melbourne’s John Mescall, who later that night took home yet another awards haul of 7 Grand Prix, 12 Golds, 4 Silvers and Five Bronze Spikes. It was a packed final day, with several Jury Presidents and legendary speakers all competing for attention, but the steamy Singaporean weather did an effective job of keeping people indoors rather than wandering the streets in a bleary-eyed haze. I made the most of Google’s free ‘brain juice’ (some kind of sugary, fruit-filled concoction that gave me sweaty palms and an eye twitch) and settled in.

Josh1.jpgJose Sokoloff started the day with a well-crafted kick in the pants to those agencies still content to base their business models on assumptions from decades ago. He used this wince-inducing opener to talk a little about the subject of failure, from Blockbuster thinking that their business was in renting physical VHS tapes and DVDs and making profit from their customer’s inevitable laziness in late returns, from Kodak standing by while digital photography ate their film business from the inside-out. In each case, nimble companies such as Netflix and Instagram reaped huge profits by understanding the fundamental transformations that were happening from the customer’s perspective and adapting accordingly. He cited the example of Tesla’s Elon Musk as someone who was unafraid to radically reimagine the possibilities of human transportation with his visionary Hyperloop plan, and encouraged agency staff at every level to do the same. There are three things that can trigger these shifts in the fundamentals of a business, he explained, from business being replaced by community (Airbnb now fills more rooms per night than the gigantic Hilton Hotel chain), to humans being replaced by machines (Vinod Khosla’s radical proposal that machines and apps will fill the shoes of 80% of doctors in the future), to the physical being replaced by the digital (the ESA is currently testing the use of 3D printing space stations on the moon).

It was inspiring, mind-expanding stuff, and in no way helped my newly-developed eye twitches and alarming sleep-deprivation-enhanced heart palpitations.

Josh2.jpgThankfully, there was some mild relief in Graham Kelly’s fantastic forum for Isobar, which both tackled the proverbial elephant in the room and smuggled off its tusks for good measure: Why is there so little genuinely original creative thinking in social media? For all the hype and promise of the last few years, he made the point that many would be hard pressed to find a decent example outside of Burger King’s ancient ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ campaign. Thankfully, he had a few lesser-known examples to illustrate the potential of social, from Grey Poupon’s delightfully snooty ‘Society of Good Taste’ Facebook campaign to Katie Perry’s unexpected fiscal advice to the Houses of Parliament via Snickers. I was particularly impressed by the ingenious integration of Twitter into Sky TV Brazil’s beautifully simple ‘#SkyRec’ idea, which effectively turned your Twitter stream into a remote control for TV-on-demand.

It was up to Tham Khai Meng (Worldwide Chief Creative office of Ogilvy) to remind everyone that enduring brand platforms will always be built by ‘touching the heart’, and once again wheeled out the omnipotent ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ as a perfect example of the way an emotional execution can ‘charm and disarm’, and therefore deliver the perfect context for the story you have to sell.

Sunlight PIG_s.jpgSpeaking of execution, Spikes Design Jury President Lo Sheung Yan then delivered an incredible behind-the-scenes look at the making of some of the most outrageously (and outrageously expensive) crafted ads of the festival, from Lowe Bangkok’s ‘Separate Them’ (left) print campaign to Johnnie Walker’s green-screen spectacular ‘Where Flavour Is King’. In an ad world where we’re all under pressure to deliver more and more content on less and less production budget, it was an important lesson to the industry that without the audience’s belief in the idea, nothing happens – including a sale. As he said, the crafting and execution of an idea is how we earn the right to interrupt a person’s time, and his passion for the fine intricacies of building that skill was incredibly inspirational to this poor little Perth boy. His final exhortation was for everyone to find the idea that they want others to believe in, and to rely on your craft to make them believe. By now, my final exhortation was to head to the convention bar and allow 3 days’ worth of knowledge to seep into my skull.

On the way there I happened to bump into John Mescall, who was about to deliver his sermon on the power of advertising to change… well, everything. For a guy who had just won an international record-breaking haul of Cannes Lions (just look at the bloody reception desk on his Twitter feed), he was one of the most genuinely approachable blokes I’d met on the trip, and was more than accommodating of my many questions, opinions and general twitchy-eyed manner.

Keith.jpgShortly afterwards I was sat about one metre from a giant of international advertising, Keith Reinhard (left), who was responsible for creating DDB Worldwide and the iconic ‘two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions on a sesame seed bun’ for McDonalds. After entertaining the crowd with the story of the call from McDonald’s CEO after the release of ‘Supersize Me’ (spoiler alert: he wasn’t happy), I managed to ask him a simple question about creative leadership which turned into a beautifully crafted and wonderfully theatrical reply encompassing Ghandi, the psychology of following and the human condition which left my head spinning.

The fact that I was able to meet two such influential admen not more than a few metres apart from one another and have these kinds of questions answered was one of the biggest draw cards of this year’s Spikes. Unlike Cannes, where everybody seems to have somewhere to be and the biggest names are constantly being preyed on by a bevy of creative succubi, the intimate setting and (let’s face it) lack of midday extracurricular activities make it the ideal place to soak up the industry and allow its awesome creative potential to sink in.

Josh3.jpgAnd then there was the after party, and the after-after party, and the after-after-after party, which rolled on and on in an endless cavalcade of music and great people and incredible conversations and dancing and those peculiarly serendipitous moments where you find yourself discussing the creative pitch of ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ with the delightful Metro Trains client in a taxi at 3am while the newly-constructed Formula 1 obstacle walls cause traffic to grind to a standstill beneath the steamy Singapore night sky.

Cheers Spikes Asia. May you make many an eyelid tw
itch when we do it all again next year.

Josh Edge is the Creative Director of Longtail. He likes puppies, naan bread with bits of lamb it and, increasingly, Tiger Beer. You can be relentlessly spammed by Singapore and Perth-related photography by Josh at instagram.com/joshbites or via Flickr at flickr.com/photos/27745483@N07/