Live updates: The ADFEST 2014 journey

Friday, 7 March 2014 00:29 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Day Two Join the Leo Burnett Solutions Inc (LBSI) team as they venture to the sunny and exotic shores of Pattaya, Thailand to experience the vibrancy of ADFEST – one of Asia’s largest and most inspirational advertising festivals. For over 25 years, ADFEST has been a platform that celebrates and promotes creative excellence, bringing together advertising professionals from around the world and inspiring them to rise to new heights of creativity, boldness and innovation. The theme for this year’s three day ADFEST event is ‘Co-Create the future’ and it highlights the importance of providing ongoing, transparent interactions between businesses and their consumers –after all today’s consumer has a powerful voice that is increasingly becoming more influential.

The festival begins! Here’s our team’s update on day one of ADFEST: We have enjoyed two great days exploring the sights and sounds of Thailand! Needless to say we were all up at the crack of dawn and excited for the first day of the festival. We arrived early to register and managed to avoid the big queues as crowds flocked in from all over the world. As anticipated, our first day was action-packed and kicked off with speaker addresses from seven of the advertising industry’s biggest movers and shakers. It was great to see entries form Leo Burnett along with those from other Sri Lankan agencies displayed amongst some of the best pieces in the region. It is evident that the Sri Lankan creative industry has taken huge strides forward and is definitely one of the top players in the region. Our morning started with a series from ‘The Fabulous Four’ with Adam Graveley, Keisuku Kuroyanagi, Tomoichiro Setsuda, moderated by Diederik van Middelkoop. Three of their short films inspired by the theme of Adfest 2014, ‘Co-Create the Future’ were premiered and we were able to listen to a discussion on the inspiration behind their films. It made us realise how important it is to learn more about bringing a strong script to life in order to develop a captivating piece of visual narrative. We really enjoyed the third session for the day which was the D&AD session with Laura Jordan-Bambach, President D&AD on the

‘Dirty Word’ which we soon found out was ‘advertising’. Using examples from this year’s White Pencil entries we analysed how a simple idea can be executed in a simple manner and make big impact. The session by Minah Kim from Chiel titled ‘Let’s Build a Better User Experience’ was definitely insightful as we analysed how increasingly many more companies have products in the same categories and at times it can be difficult to differentiate these products. We realized that for us advertisers, it all boils down to how we can make a needle stand out in a haystack! We ended the day with Toru Fujii, Joël Céré and Rob Sherlock from ADK who presented a session called ‘Welcome to the world’s biggest creative department’! The session targeted all brand marketers, creative and digital executives in local and global roles and focused on understanding the limits and potential of crowdsourcing. We looked at how we create platforms that can work either to our advantage or disadvantage. By using co-creation partners it can help companies and brands to experience and reach different platforms. Technology research company Gartner also predicts that more than half of consumer goods manufacturers will receive 75% of their consumer innovation from crowdsourced solutions by 2017. Already, 72 of the world’s biggest brands are inviting consumers to co-create content and campaigns, which is a surprisingly large number! It’s clear that consumers are thinking ahead of companies and crowdsourcing is playing a crucial role in igniting an agency’s capabilities. This year’s festival attracted 3,253 entries from 41 cities in the Asia-Pacific region. The theme of ‘Co-creation’ really does sum up the ADFEST experience in Pattaya as a whole with the meeting of a diverse range of personalities and advertising savvy professionals being a hallmark that makes ADFEST one of the industry’s most anticipated events! We are keeping our fingers crossed in hope that we can bring home metal for Sri Lanka!