Spikes Asia gears up for next week’s festival

All is in readiness for the Spikes Asia advertising festival to be held Monday and Tuesday next week at Suntec City in Singapore.

A total of 3,058 entries from 22 countries will be competing at this year’s festival, which is a 14% increase on last year.

Delegate registrations are still being taken throughout this week but have already hit the 1000 delegate mark and Festival organizers expect this to grow to at least 1200 or 1300 by the time the Festival commences. Delegate numbers have been helped this year for two reasons: AdFest’s cancellation of their March Festival due to political unrest in Thailand, and the new reduced Spikes Asia fee level this year that targets clients and students.

“The idea for our regional Festival strategy was to build festivals that allowed people who may never get to Cannes or could not get there at this point in their career to experience the amazing learning and Networking opportunity these events deliver,” said Spikes Asia Festival Chairman Terry Savage.

“Cannes is expensive and we wanted to achieve drill down into the widest base possible in our regional events. After running Dubai Lynx for three years we consulted with the industry and reduced the price to enable more participants to come. This was so successful in Dubai, where we doubled the number of delegates, we decided the same philosophy should apply to Spikes. Make the price point such that the learning and inspiration these events give was available to as wide a base as possible from as many countries as possible.”

This year’s Festival certainly boasts a strong line up of speakers, including Sir Martin Sorrell, Novelist and former Australian adman Bryce Courtney, David Jones (Worldwide CEO of Euro RSCG), Howard Draft Worldwide (CEO of Draft FCB), Akira Kagami (Dentsu), Charles Wigley (BBH), Paul Heath (Ogilvy), Andrew Robertson (Worldwide CEO BBDO), David Lubars (BBDO New York), Bob Greenberg (RGA), Paul Kemp Robertson (Contagious), Bill Rosen (Arc Worldwide), and Rei Inamato from AKQA , I could go on the list of speakers is amazing .

Savage believes the market has responded well by wanting to be at the Festival in terms of both speaking and visiting.

“We will have an open plan so that the speakers can be viewed from anywhere in the hall – the boxes of last year have gone… we will have a Cannes retrospective on the Sunday looking at the great work from Cannes in 2010 and we have condensed the Festival into a tightly packed two and a half days.

Last year’s criticism of Suntec City was listened to by Savage who said they looked at relocating to one of Singapore’s new Casinos this year but they were not able to do site visits before the booking period was required.

“Next year we will certainly look at them again. We are open minded we want what we consider is the best available venue in Singapore for this event.”

“On a social level we have retained The Networking After Dark event where our delegates will visit five different agencies for a party, plus the Award ceremony and closing Gala. This year The Award ceremony will be at the prestigious Esplanade Theatre. Fact is however that these events are now more about inspiration and learning than anything else. You go there to learn because at a time when the pace of industry change is so rapidly you must be up to speed on everything or you become irrelevant.”

“Be it Cannes, Eurobest, Dubai Lynx or Spikes the one thing we know is that our delegates must take learning away from them. These Festivals are no longer about just a good time they are about knowledge and a good time and the two are not mutually exclusive. Our mission in life is to inspire, educate and make advertising a more creatively driven environment given that creativity works – it works for our clients – it works for the consumers and it works for people who work in our business.”

Highestgrowth of entries has occurred in the TV/Cinema Craft, Radio and Direct &Sales Promotion competitions. India is the country with the highestnumber of entries with 452 entries, followed by Singapore with 379,Japan on 333 and Australia with 309 entries.

Commenting on the entries, Philip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions, jointorganisers with Haymarket of Spikes Asia said, “This year we have seengrowth across practically all categories, and in some areas the entrylevels have more than doubled. Awards provide recognition, inspirationand motivation and we are delighted with the support the agencies aregiving to Spikes Asia, now the largest awards in the region. With arecord number of attendees expected, Spikes Asia is proving to be theleading industry event to attend.”