Spikes Asia 2012: Creativity that works, the future of marketing, and lessons from Charles Dickens

David Tiltman Warc The Spikes Asia festival celebrates the best of Asian creativity. But plenty of the speakers at the 2012 conference had a more strategic focus. What's the role of creativity? Where is the industry heading? And what strategies are working for brands, both in the region and around the world. Several themes came through from the conference. One was the growing interest among brands in content creation, with Branded Entertainment included as a category in the awards for the first time (see separate article on best practice in branded content). Another was how to encourage consumers to act on a brand's behalf (see separate article onparticipation branding). Other speakers pointed to some of the key challenges facing both brands and agencies in Asia in 2012.

Creativity and effectiveness

The 2012 Spikes was the first to include Creative Effectiveness as a category, bringing the event in line with its sister festival, Cannes Lions. As at Cannes, entries to this category had to have been shortlisted at the previous year's competition to be eligible. There has been a lot written about the links between creativity and effectiveness in recent years, and Chris Thomas, Chairman of BBDO Asia and the chairman of the Creative Effectiveness jury, ran through some of the key research in his presentation. He cited plenty of work that will be familiar to Warc users particularly the research by Peter Field in the UK that looked at IPA Effectiveness Awards winner and how they performed in creative competitions. That research found that highly creative campaigns were 11 times more efficient at building market share than non-creative campaigns. Thomas also pointed to Field's findings regarding the potency of television, and the power of emotional rather than rational appeals. And he pointed to the importance of developing powerful local insights, pointing to our very own Warc Prize for Asian Strategy. In the 2011 Prize, he noted, 23 of the 25 shortlisted

entries were single-market. As it happens, in the 2012 Prize, the equivalent figure was 29 out of 32. As it turned out, the Spikes Asia Creative Effectiveness category generated 34 entries a tiny fraction of the total and lower than the equivalent category at Cannes Lions. National Australia Bank's much-feted 'Break Up' campaign won the Grand Prix (full case available on Warc). Three other campaigns took home awards in the category: 'Shave Sutra' by BBDO for Gillette in India (full case available on Warc); 'The Ripple Effect' by Grey for Australia's Transport Accident Commission (full case available on Warc); and Selleys 3-in-1 by Belgiovane Williams Mackay Ultimo for Selleys in Australia. Clearly, there is still plenty of work to be done in this area in Asia. And Thomas concluded by summarising some of the factors that may be holding the industry back. The "inputs" into the industry, he argued, may be affecting its "outputs". He ended with a series of questions for the industry:

Are agencies hiring people who can bring interesting new ideas with them? Or are they hiring "faces to fees" people who look the part? Is the industry investing enough in R&D and education? Are agencies taking the lead in research techniques, or are they simply outsourcing decision-making? Are agencies remunerated by results, or for the time taken to create work? The discussion about creativity and effectiveness is particularly relevant here. Are agencies looking at "new practice" or "best practice"? They may need to think beyond the existing body of work to move forward.

AKQA: Five ideas for marketing's future

Rei Inamoto, Chief Creative Officer at digital specialist AKQA, offered five ways brands should think differently about their marketing, in a session titled 'The future of advertising isn't advertising'. 1. The future is not buying media, it's buying software Marketers, argued Inamoto, "have to start thinking like software developers". The current mindset is to buy a media-based campaign, then to repeat the same process a year or two later. Software developers, however, buy products that they can upgrade regularly without having to start from the beginning again.

The difference between paying for a campaign and paying for software, he said, was similar to the difference between renting and buying a house. Buying means building equity over time, whereas renting does not. A good example is the way Nike has built its Fuel offering. 2. The future is not media, it's product Can a message be built onto a product? Inamoto argued that marketers and production teams should become much closer. The opportunity to use products and packaging as a brandbuilding tool is growing. 3. The future is not brand story, it's behaviour The way a brand behaves is more important than the stories it decides to tell. To illustrate this point, Inamoto pointed to a campaign promoting Sweden in which the organisers handed over the official Twitter account to different people every week. This led, said Inamoto, to "total disaster" when one person used the account to tweet racially inappropriate comments. However, the campaign organisers did not cancel her account or delete the tweets; the point was to show that Sweden valued freedom of speech. "The behaviour of Sweden says more than a story could." 4. The future is not campaigns, it's franchises This idea is about giving consumers a stake in a business's success. Social platforms offer new ways to mobilise consumers, and for consumers to mobilise each other. 5. The future is not 360, it's 365 "We rely on the notion of disruption to get people's attention," said Inamoto. But services such as Instagram or Flipboard, he said, "rely on the notion of attraction", offering consumers something they want and allowing them to access it whenever and wherever they want. The point should not be about surrounding consumers with "360 degrees of media", but on offering them "365 days of connection" The five points, Inamoto admitted, formed a "highly biased opinion". He concluded: "Take it or leave it."

BBDO: Four lessons from Charles Dickens

Unlike Inamoto, BBDO Worldwide CEO Andrew Robertson does believe in the future of storytelling. At a time when brands are thinking more carefully about the content they produce,

he argued that marketers could do well by looking at the way Charles Dickens structured his stories. The question hanging over the session 'Would Dickens have tweeted?' He pointed to four lessons from Dickens' writing that apply to brands looking at content today. 1. Unforgettable characters Robertson cited the creators of the show Lost, who claimed they had learned more from Dickens than anyone else. Their lesson: "The audience don't fall in love with plots. They fall in love with characters." An example from the brand world was BBDO's work for M&M's, which sought to create a character, Miss Brown, out of the product. 2. Compelling plots Dickens' work was serialised in journals, meaning that the end of each chapter had to entice people to read the next one in the following edition. That meant he was constantly trying to surprise his readers with new twists. Though, crucially, the surprises "must make sense" within the context of the story. That is the lesson for advertisers. The Snickers 'You're not you when you're hungry' ads by BBDO from around the world have this sense of a surprise that makes sense, said Robertson. (Full case study on Warc.) <

3. Populist entertainment Dickens wrote for the masses, said Robertson. Brands should do so too. 4. Social commentary Dickens' work was rooted in social commentary he observed what was going on in his era, and his works were highly topical. Brands, argued Robertson, should aim for similar topicality. A dramatic example comes from AT&T, which managed to integrate almost-live footage of Olympic action into TV commercials. The ads were turned round in 24 hours. Incidentally, the question of whether Dickens would have tweeted was never fully answered, though Robertson did point out how well some of his writing ('It was the best of times, it was the worst of times', for example) would have worked in 140 characters.