Visiting Adfest 2014, the Mecca of Asia’s advertising festivals
THAILAND – Most Sri Lankans know Pattaya as a Thai resort town, thrown in as a part of the typical four day, three night cheap budget tour packages one sees advertised in the Sunday Times Hit Ads. But for one glorious three-day spell, often in March of every year, this little Russian tourist mecca also plays host to one of Asia’s biggest advertising festivals, Adfest, now in its 17th year.
Always popular with the Sri Lankan ad industry because of the strength and diversity of its creative showing, its quaint seaside setting, and its 24/7 party atmosphere, this year’s edition of Adfest offered no less, having welcomed a 40 member strong contingent that
The Leo team with their winning award
included ad men and women from Response, Triad, Sarva, Shift, Lowe LDB, Bates, Phoenix O&M, Grant, Leo Burnett Solutions Inc, TBWA TAL, Magenta and Juice Productions. They were also amongst close to 1,000 delegates representing the breadth and width of the Asia Pacific, as well as even the Middle East – featuring a sprawling 3,253 entries, from 41 cities, competing in 17 categories. At the same time, the festival also encompassed a number of industry speakers, workshops and, of course, networking opportunities such as lunches and parties.
Speaking to the Business Times on the sidelines of Adfest 2014, Russell Miranda, a former Spikes Asia jury member, and the current Executive Creative Director at Colombo-based Grant McCann Erickson, shared the following thoughts about the highlights of this year’s festival, as well as how important it was for young Sri Lankan ad industry personnel to attend events such as Adfest:
“The best sessions were the Contagious Magazine session and the ADK one, about co-creation, collaboration with creative. For me that was something I’ve been reading about recently and I am getting more interested in it. And also you see some of the better work that’s happening, like McCann has done for audiobooks with illustrated print ads. So it is interesting to see how well things like that work. So in a sense the timing of that thought was good. Contagious is always good because its fusion between contemporary culture and advertising is very insightful.
Another thing is the amazing amount of non-traditional work and an understanding of the quality of that work. I think this year there was a huge amount of non-traditional work that used technology in a very personal, emotional, almost non tech way. Because I think that that whole noise around being techy is past a bit. There were some brilliant examples. Some things were disarmingly simple. They have used technology but very sparingly and very subtly.
Also there were enough examples of how well the scope of traditional work was worked out well with a singular idea right across. I think those examples are very enlightening for young creatives because we talk about not only doing press, radio, TV, and let’s do this and that, and most people don’t have a clue what that means. Here, the use of mobile applications and even the use of mobile screens was very real, instead of only having a tenuous connection to the campaign. If at all, for young creatives, that would have been the most important lesson to learn,” he said.
Additionally much hyped at this year’s Adfest was the always popular Gunn Report, an amalgam of the winners of all 46 creative awards show across the planet. Further, and amongst many more events held during this period, speaker sessions titled “Sticky Music”, by Mark Beckhaus, “Welcome to the Global Wonderland”, by Yoshi Matsuura, and “The Dividends of Diversification”, by Peter Grasse, were highly praised by attendees.