The best of what I saw at Spikes Asia 2015
For those of you who don’t know what Spikes Asia is (spikes.asia), here’s a quick intro: it’s an yearly, 3-day festival of creativity hosted at Suntec City in Singapore, by the very same folks that run the Cannes Lions, Eurobest, and Dubai Lynx. This year I was able to attend the event in full, while representing Vocanic, the agency I work for.
And here’s that caught my attention during the combinations of seminars, workshops, tech talks, competitions, video broadcasts, awards ceremonies and networking parties that happened this year:
#1 The Big Tech Three
Facebook, Twitter, and Google all had main stage keynotes this year. Our “frenemies”, as Martin Sorrell calls them, are ever more encroached and intertwined within the media and communication industry. Fergus O’Hare, the new Head of Creative Shop for APAC, presented for Facebook. Nice bloke from Ireland, caustic sense of humor. He teased the audience with a few Facebook ad formats that are not yet available for sale. He also showed a handful of “creative data” campaigns, or pieces of communication that leveraged in full the targeting and format possibilities of the platform. Agencies are still quite bad at doing these themselves. Facebook is currently pushing aggressively for Video Ads and Instagram Ads across the region, and that message was re-iterated by Fergus.
Google also showed off their creative capabilities, particularly highlighting a campaign they did for EA Sports’ Madden NFL, called #Giferator. Again, digital at its best, with creative engines that allowed users to generate an unlimited combination of animated GIFs with resources from the game, while at the same time leveraging precision targeting based on the game’s potential audience. Mobile, social, content, data: all boxes ticked.
Twitter’s Steven Kalifowitz (@skalifowitz) highlighted the #PowerOfNow. As the platform struggles with aggressive investors looking for a definition for the future, Twitter seems to be banking on the platform’s hold of the current moment, the live, the best companion for live experiences happening out there. I buy into this vision. Periscope is also a step in this same positioning (his team was broadcasting the presentation on it). Steven is a good presenter, and took questions from the audience using Twitter itself. Two nice little visions of what Twitter can offer for brands.
The general takeout for me was: agencies, watch out. All major tech players are continuing/growing their investments on internal creative resources (Creative Shop is hiring across the region) and on beefing up their direct relationships with bigger clients. Either agencies adapt and move up their offerings one level higher, as cross-platform consultants, or they will perish.
#2 Some great work, lots of lost work
Spikes Asia is also a creative awards competition, albeit one that is very rigged in favor of big, global network agencies (they can spend to enter, and the jury process is controlled by their representatives). I spent some time browsing the work of multiple categories, and liked a handful of projects in the Design, Mobile, and Branded Entertainment categories. Here are some interesting work done across the region:
Volkswagen’s “Reduce Speed Dial” (New Zealand)
Uni-Noodle’s “House of Little Moments” (Taiwan)
Pedigree’s “Found” (New Zealand)
Culture Convenience Club’s “Panicoupon” (Japan)
In general, most work seen didn’t scale in the proportion that it could. Agencies still treat their projects as campaigns that have a beginning and an end, and not like products that are nurtured and grow with time. The advertising industry still hasn’t figured out how to monitise that startup approach of doing things.
#3 Two great TechTalks
Attended two of them: one by R/GA Singapore, and one by some colleagues from Maxus Metalworks. Metalworks is a creative technology team that sits inside Maxus, one of the media agencies of GroupM (GroupM is a controller at Vocanic as well).
R/GA ran a demo of a dynamic visual storytelling tool that combines keywords with databases of videos and sounds to put together videos on the fly. It’s the beginning of a very interesting platform, one that could help advanced marketers create more tailored messaging to audiences.
Alex Jaspers from Metalworks talked about process and technology, while Mithru and Daylon sourced a few volunteers from the crowd to have their arms controlled by someone else using electrodes.
#4 Lovely student briefs
Had the chance to hear out a few student ideas at the conclusion of the Spikes Young Creative Academy, hosted by a good friend of mine. Lots of energy in the room, and very tough behaviour change briefs (education in Pakistan, food wastage in Vietnam, over-sexualized media in South Korea, lack of friendliness in China). All insights were bang on, although some ideas lacked the creativity or viability needed. They are on the right path, though.
#5 Shy networking
Met some interesting creative people from a creative technologist shop in Jakarta, talked to a handful of the speakers, but in general the networking vibe is very shy compared to Cannes Lions or Dubai Lynx.
So this was my overall experience with Spikes Asia this year. If you want to know more about it, drop me a tweet at @andregoiano.
Make sure you explore the winning work here.
