LIA Creative Conversations 2013: Day One

LBB are in Las Vegas for the second year of the London International Awards’ ‘Creative Conversations’. Young creatives from around the globe have again been invited to the conference to connect with industry leaders and even sit in on judging statue discussions. Here’s a round up of the first day.

 

Emma Wilkie

The Gunn Report’s Emma Wilkie kicked of the LIA Creative Conversations in Las Vegas today with a spree of the past year’s best work. 

Easing in the attending young creatives with some inspiration to fuel their coming week, the first spot shown was Axe’s ‘Susan Glenn’ out of BBH New York. Shot by Rattling Stick’s Ringan Ledgwidge, the ad remembers the ‘one that got away’ – we’ve all got one, right?

 

Next up was the biggest of coincidences – yeah, right – for Australian beer brand, Carlton. The Clemenger BBDO Melbourne-created spot sees four best pals ‘coincidentally’ take their partners on holiday to the same resort, at exactly the same time. The women are ditched and the bar is propped.

 

Leo Burnett Paris’ Le Trèfle ad ‘Emma’ spurred a sea of giggles from the audience. With the rise in use of tablets and smartphones for reading books, paper technology is being pushed out the back door. But, as Emma shows, there will always be one very primal use for it.

 

To finish up her introduction, Wilkie played the multi award-winning ‘Meet The Superhumans’. Director Tom Tagholm’s craft in this never fails to give me the shivers. 

 

Wilkie also spoke about The Gunn Report’s ‘All Gunns Blazing’, the publication’s umbrella term for integrated campaigns. Amongst the featured work was Mayo Draftfcb Lima’s ‘Potable Water Generator’, URA.RU’s ‘Make the Politicians Work’, Dove’s ‘Real Beauty Sketches’, and Draftfcb’s ‘Driving Dogs’. 

Faris Yakob

Genius Steals founder Faris Yakob took to the stage to talk 'The Present Futures of Communication'. Faris shared his idea of 'Cultural Latency' - "the correlation between the amount of time it takes to distribute something, and the amount of time it takes for that thing to have an effect, and consequently the amount of time that thing stays relevant and interesting." The computer generation, as opposed to the TV generation, churns media at a much faster pace and, therefore, assumes a much faster assumed response threshold. Think Twitter and email, but also Vine - a format still decreasing that threshold to a tiny six seconds, and something Faris came close to imitating even before its release.

Nick Law

CCO of R/GA, Nick Law, spoke of the four most miserable words in advertising: Big Data & Big Idea. He believes the same thing is happening with data that has happened with the media - we're literal about it, but also in control of it, willingly using and displaying it through apps. For someone to ask why companies want data is irrelevant - it should be, 'why would I want my data?'. The buyer is signalling intent to the seller and turning the traditional model on its head. In relation to 'Big Idea', Nick thinks the ad industry has changed from being mostly concerned with communications to being mostly concerned with services with a systematic use. A 'whole idea' uses both storytelling and systematic use – it’s something you can play with. Take Beats by Dre headphones during the Olympics, for example - it was mostly human insight and their ability to 'play' with the product that allowed it to simmer from bottom up. 

Sheridan Thomas

Great Guns' Global Head of Content and Interactive, Sheridan Thomas's talk on interactive film and taking chances was an eye opener. 80 per cent of TV audiences are now using a second screen - #dealwithit, he says, because it's here to stay. We need to embrace new technology - "but don't fuck it, or even worse, let it fuck you". A critique of interactive film is that the viewer wants to be passive, not active: an assumption that's inaccurate. Viewers aren't lazy in participating with interactivity - just look at GTAV and the whopping $800million it turned over in just 24 hours. Consumers generally don't need it spelled out to them, either, as Bobby McFerrin simply shows during a TED talk of his. Sheridan then showed the audience a result of a client willing to take a chance. Subaru's 'The Big Night' interactive film out of Japanese agency ADK is made up of 170 different individual sections and contains over 45 minutes of finished film, all taking you on a different journey.