Where ideas collide: ADFEST 2025 opens in Pattaya

Friday, 21 March 2025 00:10 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Hasini Assiriyage

Pattaya, Thailand is a city where the unexpected collides. A melting pot of cultures, a clash of old and new, a symphony of neon lights and ocean waves. It’s a place where contradiction doesn’t just exist – it thrives.

Much like Pattaya itself, Asia’s Advertising Festival, better known as ADFEST (held annually in Pattaya), is a collision of ideas, perspectives, and disciplines. As the region’s only international festival of advertising creativity, it features some of the world’s most prominent Advertising and Marketing professionals delivering cutting edge learning on the subjects through lectures and workshops. A non-profit organisation, ADFEST has spent years nurturing and elevating creative excellence across the Asia Pacific and MENA regions.

Fittingly, this year’s theme is “Collide” – a celebration of the unexpected intersections that drive creativity forward. Over the next three days, the festival will host an electrifying mix of talks, breakout sessions, and open access to some of the most brilliant minds in creativity, design, marketing, leadership, production and everything in between. It’s the kind of experience that fuels the obsessive curiosity of anyone who fell in love with this industry.

With speakers and delegates from across the world, ADFEST is a meeting point for fresh insights, challenging discussions, and bold new approaches. Many of the conversations will revolve around the tension and potential harmony between forces often seen as opposing: AI and human ingenuity, technology and tradition, commerce and culture. Can these forces coexist? More importantly, can they amplify each other to spark something truly groundbreaking?

Pattaya, with its vibrant contrasts, feels like the perfect analogy for the creative mind- chaotic yet brilliant, unpredictable yet full of possibilities. ADFEST 2025 promises to be an unforgettable experience, one that will leave attendees brimming with ideas, inspiration, and perhaps a little bit of existential questioning.

But for now, as the first night in Pattaya winds down, my mind is consumed by a different kind of collision – the bewildering mix of flavours that await me at the nearest 7/11.

(The writer is Associate Creative Director at DEFY, an independent advertising and design agency in Sri Lanka.)

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