What a great start to the annual “Circus Festival” held at Carriageways in Redfern on Tuesday.
The day kicked off at 9am with Faris Yakob (MDC) bouncing around the stage like a jack-in-the-box on crack. His presentation The Importance of Being Awesome talked about a future that is not just incredibly technological (and in his words “that’s just stuff we don’t understand yet”) and creative, but also ‘Totally Awesome’ (in the wrath of God sense, not in the sk8er boy way). He explored the concept of “Cultural Latency”, the correlation of the amount of time it takes for a thing to have effect and consequently the amount of time it stays relevant for, which has profound impact on the rapidly changing world today.
The second speaker; a more reserved but equally interesting, John Alyward (ex.GAP) spoke to us about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the need of brands to either make it core to what they are as a business, or unashamedly make it a “thin veneer” to their broader business strategy. He cited Facebook and Apple respectively, to be the great examples of the two extremes. Facebook’s mission, “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”, proudly promoted on their site and Apple’s, which is much harder to find was put simply is, “We make good shit”. He left the audience with the unanswered question of which is right. Hmmm, let me think about that one.
Tom Uglow from Google spoke about how digital is shaping up to add colour to the future and that brands could be the curators of content for their customers. The Art Project is a great example of this; launching with 19 art galleries from around the world and showcasing some of the world’s best art through Google maps and Street View technology. It reminded me of a brief Deepend received in 2000 from a significant contemporary art gallery that promised us that real art would never be shown on the Internet and that it was about getting people to visit the museum in person. How times have changed.
Vince Frost showed some great work by Frost and convinced us that all the work from Frost was not all done by Vince… Frost. Great work though!
Jeff Julian, my personal stand out favourite, is a prolific creative, conceptual artist, story-teller and illustrator, working across what appears to be every sci-fi, Visual FX film know to man. He enthralled the audience about the process of creating “future worlds”, in today’s reality; from the concept inception, through to the production process.His comment in the post presentation Q&A, proposed what the communications industry can learn from Hollywood and visa versa, was that we could “learn how to tell better stories” and Hollywood could “learn how to tell better stories”. Stay tuned for Prometheus, his pick for a blockbuster worth seeing.
Rosanna Iacono, Chief Brand Officer at Julique seriously knew her stuff… about Julique at least and its brand position both here and internationally. In a thrifty market, consumers need to see beauty products as “an investment not an indulgence”.
Joe Crump from Razorfish brought the esoteric concepts back to the fore with his hypothesis of “Digital Darwinism”. He examined the world’s biggest brands via an interesting “Gene Scorecard” where for brands to survive, they need to contain all 7 genes including; Authenticity, Adaptively, Relevance, Transformative, Fresh, Social and Immersive. His interesting point was that a large proportion of the 10 leading brands in the world today (ie. the ones that all 7 genes in spades) have been in existence less than 5 years, causing many of the old players in the industry to shake in their boots.
Gatorade, the 3rd largest sports brand in the World??, (Go figure.) has been doing some amazing campaigns globally, led by an adopted Aussie (Kiwi), Sarah O’Hagan in the hot seat in North America. Flying in with three kids for the show, Sarah put forward some impressive work by the brand including Gatorade Replay, a grassroots approach to tackling the engagement of the masses while not alienating their athlete stalwarts. What surprised me the most about this presentation was not that Gatorade, the 3rd largest sports brand in the world has an in-house dedicated social media team, but that team consisted of a total of 6 people?! They are either supermen & women or Australia has a long way to go to understand how to effectively manage social media.
Finally and I think they saved one of the best speakers till last was Nick Law from RGA. Another Australian export, Nick heads up creative at RGA one of the few agencies that have successfully melded digital with creative, to create some of the world’s best campaigns and products for the likes of Nike, Pepsi, HBO and Verizon. Nick spoke about the two very different worlds of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley and how in today’s worlds they crash head-long into one another on the media stage. Or in Nick’s words the “Software stage”. (Take iTunes, Hulu and and Spotify as a just a few examples.) Nick took the audience on a journey to find the common ground between to very differing mindsets and laid it out is a, “very sexy” Venn diagram. Madison Ave is about the Story; Silicon Valley is about the System. Where they meet in the middle is “Play”.
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