Emir Shafri’s Spikes Asia Diary: Day 3

Young & Rubicam Singapore’s Digital Lead Emir Shafri (pictured far left) is a jury member of the Innovation category at Spikes Asia, here’s his take on day three of the Festival.

While Day 2 was about convergence in adland today, Day 3 for me was really about adland’s tomorrow.

And by ‘tomorrow’, I don’t mean the cool tech available to us, although yes, I did spend some time playing with Softbank and Dentsu’s Pepper. I’m talking about the young talent driving its future.

I started the day with fellow Innovation Spikes juror AJ (Anthony James, Chief Innovation & Growth Officer, DDB Group Hong Kong) and SOCIALDEVIANT Founder and CEO Marc Landsberg, who gave an amazing talk on content marketing on Thursday, on the judging panel of the Young Spikes Digital Competition. 14 pairs, representing some of the region’s best digital talent, spent 24 hours on developing a yearlong social media campaign for Singapore Tourism Board, aimed at getting event organisers to consider Singapore as the place to host their meetings and conferences.

And boy, were we blown away. Despite having just a day to work on it, the teams came back with some really strong, sound ideas. Every time I’m thinking of taking shortcuts on a brief just so I can have it easy, I’ll think about the relentlessness of these young talents and I’ll get back to it, before they make me eat their dust.

After the judging was done, I had the privilege of meeting with Asia Pacific’s top students who were selected for the Spikes Young Creative Academy together with Alvaro Bruch, a brilliant young senior interactive art director whom I have the pleasure of working with. We got to see the students’ final presentations, before having an informal chat with them about how we broke into the industry. Fun fact: I was part of the first Spikes Young Creative Academy, so it was a real treat to be able to go back into the academy to speak to the students who were sitting right where I was several years ago. Big thanks to Noor Azhar and Cheil for having us.

We went into the room thinking we’d be teaching them a thing or two, but we were the ones who came out learning a lot from the industry’s future. Just observing how after simply spending a mere 48 hours with each other, they managed to take on an issue plaguing their community and solve it in a way that’s not only creative but also natural to the community, made me ask myself: what problems have I solved in my own community in the last 48 hours (except for, perhaps, a non-existent alcohol surplus)? It goes to show that if we really put our minds to it, we can be the change we want to be in the world, as Gandhiji would say.

Indeed, change was the order of the night at the Spikes Asia Award Ceremony. The show celebrated a lot of work that has the potential to bring about serious change on behalf of brands. We were honoured to award Grey Singapore’s Life Saving Dot with the Innovation Spikes Grand Prix (Singapore, represent!), which instead of using cutting edge technology, used a symbol of beauty that has existed for 5,000 years to solve the potentially life-threatening iodine deficiency problem in India in a natural, simple and innovative way. Big congrats to Ali, Sudhir and team.

So there you have it: my 3 days at Spikes Asia. It was a great experience getting up-close-and-personal with the best of our industry today, and its best talents tomorrow. Big thanks to Spikes Asia for having me, and to Ben, Johan, Arvind, AJ, Christoph and Grant for an awesome and insightful time together on the innovation jury. Till next September!

Photo Captions –

READ EMIR’S DAY ONE COVERAGE

READ EMIR’S DAY TWO COVERAGE