MAD STARS 2023 Day 2: Data That Illuminates

Some of the world's leading advertising and marketing minds converged in Busan, South Korea this week for the 2023 MAD STARS Festival.

The second day opened with a stirring presentation from Jewook Oh, CEO of dob Studio, in which he demonstrated how his company can use AI to bring people back to life with cutting-edge technology.

“A KPOP artist born in 1980 and died in 2013 released a new song in 2022,” Jewook said.“Thanks to technological advances, we can move our imagination across time and space into reality.”

Svitlana Stepanenko, managing partner at BetterSvit, followed with a presentation titled: ‘Ukrainian Advertising Industry in Times of War: Challenges and Opportunities’ - a crowd-favourite that proved the perfect way to round out the morning session.

“The Ukranian market has shrunk dramatically in size since the war began,” Svitlana said. “However, despite being one-third of the pre-war size, we have grown in other directions and created many more bold projects and gone global beyond our borders.”

The day’s proceedings also included a physical exhibition, highlighting some of the strongest entries into this year’s MAD STARS awards, as well as in the Effie Korea Awards.

The afternoon’s speakers included Zeno Yoo, platform strategy group lead at INNOCEAN, Nishanth Raju, Asian MD for Lotame Solutions, Erin Williams, sales director at CNN International, Hojun Kang CEO at Daekyo Co., Ltd, Yoshimasa Nakano chief director of Dentsu International, and Chew Wee Ng, head of APAC marketing, TikTok.

The afternoon also included a panel discussion entitled AI and Branding soon followed, including Jae Chae, senior sales manager for Shutterstock Korea, Junyoung Jang, LG Plus VP, Hyunjung Ju CMO at JOBKOREA, and Andy JY Song, managing director at Song & Partners.

The show was stolen, however, by the final and keynote speaker, Artwell Nwaila, head of creative for Google, Sub-Saharan Africa.In a captivating presentation about leveraging data to amplify creativity in advertising, Artwell called on creatives to replace demographic-driven campaigns with intent-driven campaigns.

“When we are just doing creative for the sake of creative, we lose out on driving impact in a world where clients are struggling real hard,” Artwell said.

Citing a recent poll, Artwell added that 81% of marketers feel their leadership is driving pressure on ROI, before continuing onto the point that the use of data at different stages in the creative process (which he outlined as briefing, development, retention, and post-campaign), is being misdirected by a focus on demographic data.

“Demographic information is almost useless,” Artwell said. “Don’t use data to blindly inform, use it to illuminate.”

MAD STARS returns for a final day this Friday, at which the MAD STARS 2023 Award winners will be announced.