Creative conversations in Vegas: Sophie Beard learns that story telling and play are connected

Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne’s Sophie Beard is one of 60 of the hottest young creatives in the world invited to participate in Creative Conversations, part of the LIA Awards week in Las Vegas. Here are her first impressions.

Arriving at the beautiful Encore Hotel, we all tottered in eager and a little desperate to make friends (or maybe that was just me?). Anyway, despite the haze of jet lag we all settled in for the first few days of talks. And as the coffee kicked-in and jet lag eased, one main theme started to emerge – participation.

On day one Faris Yakob assured us that the future isn’t headed for some Minority Report dystopia (sorry Philip K Dick). But rather a future where we’re all participants. And when you look at toddlers who throw a tanty because they assume every TV is touchscreen, like the iPhones they were operating since birth – it seems that future is already here.

Mark Tutssel continued down this path stating that some of the most powerful ideas are those where we want to participate, instead of passively consuming. Nick Law‘s theory on participation is that all good creative should end-up in the playground. Law believes that the strongest creative work we’re seeing now meets at a junction between story telling and utility called ‘play’.

But finally Great Guns’ Sheridan Thomas summarised it best by flipping the old film saying ‘don’t tell, show’ to “‘don’t show, play.” To a group of young creatives in Las Vegas that sounds like invitation to play to me.