Gerety Talks: New York Creativity
The Gerety Awards kicked off the 2024 season with a champagne cocktail in the Big Apple, bringing together the Gerety community for networking drinks, hosted in the WPP campus at the 3 World Trade Center.
Welcomed by Rob Reilly, global chief creative officer at WPP the panel was moderated by Stephanie Paterik GM of Editorial, editor in chief The Trade Desk and included:
Harsh Kapadia, EVP, chief creative officer, MRM New York
Laura Maness, global CEO, Grey
Emma Armstrong, chief executive officer, FCB New York
Emily Sander, executive creative director, VML NYC
Gerety Awards co-founder Lucía Ongay, said, “It was great to kick-off this year celebrating with such a vibrant creativity community as New York, as we get ready for a wonderful new edition of Gerety Awards. We enjoyed a powerful conversation around New York Creativity, as powerful as the Gerety Jury and we look forward to receiving some great campaigns for our jury to evaluate this year”.
“As an English person, I always looked at New York as kind of this pinnacle of creativity and a melting pot of everyone coming together with great clients, great creative minds and really great work, it has always been the very top of the mountain. To me New York creativity is really what creativity is. We at FCB think creativity is bringing together two things to solve a problem and when we do that to solve our client’s business problems, that is the goal of creativity, that is creativity at its best” explained Emma Armstrong with the first question that started the discussion around New York Creativity.
“The first word I thought about is more of an attitude, is intensity. The intensity and the intention to which New Yorkers come to work every day. When approaching the brief thinking “I am going to push this to get there”. Having now worked across all sorts of offices within the VML network, I can feel that even more. Kansas City is the hub and there is really a great heart that comes from there but there is the intensity and intention that I find special” added Emily Sander and the audience cheered with applause.
The conversation continued around the constant changes in creativity and the changes at work coming out of the pandemic, even after 4 years out of it, Harsh said “The pandemic was kind of an equaliser for all of us. There are people still catching up. What post covid did is that it fast tracked so many buzz words into our lives that by the time you learn this, the next thing is out…The speed of innovation has gone to a whole other level”.
Some of the topics mentioned when Stephanie brought to the table AI wanting to find out how panellists felt about it where risk averse, ethical concerns, trying to get advantage of it, efficiency, getting more ideas and how law blocks experimenting with AI today especially in the US as the law can’t keep up fast enough with where technology is going.
Chat GPT was also part of the conversation since Laura had used it to prepare her answers asking for its advice and shared her “answers” making the audience laugh.
Regarding the cultural mood of the audience, advertising and advertiser’s heading to Super Bowl with so much going on in the world like election year in the US and lot of intensity happening the craving for some levity and laughter were mentioned by the panel, as well as the permission for brands to dive into humour, coming back to fundamentals and being themselves and understanding who they are as a brand.
Laura said, “Earlier in a meeting we were talking about origin stories and having permission to leverage that kind of DNA so that there is authenticity. But I hope it is all about bringing the entertainment value back to advertising. Some of the purpose messaging has become overpromising and very heavy; everybody is with you and together. The world is intense, and we are craving entertainment…we are seeing in culture the entertainers are taking over. Whether it brings laughter or not, it should dial up the entertainment factor to be memorable.”
The conversation was rounded up with the ins and outs that panellists would like to see for this 2024 in creativity and some of the topics mentioned to look forward to in 2024 were the year of proof, the return of courage for brands after leaving fear behind, letting go the buzzword bingo and getting back into real ideas and getting more confidence to enable speed for creativity.
