Hally Lara’s Spikes Asia Diary: Day 1
Hally Lara, general manager, WiTH Collective shares the top five things she garnered on Day 1 of Spikes
I arrived at Spikes with excitement over what the three days would hold and a little angst about planning out my schedule. There is a strange FOMO one gets at these events around making the right choices about which speakers and stages to spend their time at. A few of the people I really wanted to see overlapped and I worried I may miss out. Luckily for me, Spikes Asia takes place in one room not much larger than the size of a school gym, with three stages you can see and even hear from each other. Perfect I thought, I won’t miss a thing, except for the R/GA Tech Talk on Art, Code and Tech, which filled up half an hour before it started.
1. Chuck Porter, chairman and co-founder of CP+B – Whisky, Rum, Board Shorts and Advertising
Unfortunately, Chuck wasn’t there in real life, but in a video recording from Cannes. Products are now more important than advertising and if you bake strategy and marketing into the design of these products, they will market themselves. Think anything Apple. If agencies begin to create their own products or partner with the right people to do so, they become empowered by the fact they own their work, instead of their clients owning the work they produce.
2. Senta Slingerland, director of brand strategy at Lions Festivals – creativity matters for business, for Change, for Good.
Following on from Chuck, Senta analysed this year’s Cannes winners and distilled them into three common themes – disruption, product and culture. To cut through, make an impact and achieve ROC (return on creative investment), brands need to go beyond marketing and the campaign. Yes, I know we’ve been saying this for years, but the Lucky Iron Fish Project, The Life Saving Dot and Volvo Life Paint are just a few of the many examples that truly bring the concept of human first to life.
3. Fergus O’Hare, head of APAC for Facebook Creative Shop – creativity in a mobile world:
A solid reminder that the mobile phone has truly become the sun and the entire world revolves around this screen. That people are more attentive on their phones than the TV. That people watch more than four billion videos a day on Facebook, and most of these are on the mobile. That Facebook is an incredibly powerful tool where personalised marketing can be achieved at scale and never again should an ad only be seen by the creative team that produced it 
and the industry judges at awards shows.
4. David Mayo, CEO of Bates CHI & Partners – how our industry needs to change:
The key takeout here was on giving young talent a bigger voice in defining the culture, process and the creative product of our agencies. Given the majority of larger agencies run by an older generation of advertising execs, no disrespect intended, still face challenges with adapting to the modern human, perhaps it’s time to try a bottom-up approach to solving problems, responding to briefs and even making hiring decisions.
5. Abraham Abbi Asefaw, founder of The Pop Up Agency – we only need 48 hours to solve a brief:
From research through to an idea in 48 hours, my first thought was this must be an agency advertising itself at its best? While today was the theory and tomorrow Abbi will workshop the details, the concept of taking only 48 hours to solve a brief got me thinking that the old linear model of suit takes brief, planner writes brief over two weeks, client doesn’t agree with brief, planner waters down brief, client approves brief, creatives hate brief, etc., is completely fraught with the old way of doing things.