Is the internet making everything shit? The Sweet Shop’s Claire Davidson finds out this and more on first day of Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity
The Sweet Shop’s executive producer, Asia and MENA Claire Davidson is at Singapore based Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity. Claire attended several of today’s seminars and here is her take on day one.
All was abuzz on the ground this morning at Suntec Exhibition Centre in Singapore for day one of the Fifth Annual Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity. The three-day program ahead is jam packed with seminars, forums, tech talks, events, workshops, awards and celebrations attended by the Asia Pacific region’s leading creative community.
Spikes Asia this year hareceived close to 4900 entries, from across 20 countries. Delegate numbers and attendance are up at 1800 this year.
The juries have all been locked away in dark rooms for the last few days, studiously poring over the work and making their assessments, with judging set to wrap up at the end of today.
I was a very conscientious little delegate and took in a number of the keynote seminars on offer today, with some wraps ups below.
Firstly, Blake Harrop (Managing Director) and Shingo Ohno (Art Director) from Weiden + Kennedy Tokyo Lab brought us a seminar on the “Internet Backstreets of Japan”. W+K Tokyo Lab was founded in 2003 as an experimental music label. The company has always had a special, deep, very genuine relationship with and love of street culture. Based on this, people in the street culture scene in Tokyo actively come to W+K to seek a relationship. W+K seeks to provide a platform – a global stage to give people doing interesting things an audience – and has helped musicians in various subcultures to record, publish, create music videos, create album concepts & art works, and produce events. It’s a collaboration pioneering and innovating the genre. The guys even gave us a live demo of an app they had developed – showcasing a audio mixer on their phones.
Fashion, handbag and luxury designers got on board early with the emerging street culture, and have been inspired to partner with these musicians, DJs, contemporary artists, graffiti artists, the Harajuku scene or other subcultures. The backstreets of Tokyo have long been a breeding ground for creative and underground industries, moving beyond Japan’s borders to have influence on a global scale.
Whilst this ‘fast fashion revolution’ was taking place, another group of young creative folk were experimenting with HTML, Flash and animation. This led to another movement, and rather than the Harajuku backstreets of Japan, all of a sudden everyone was looking at the internet backstreets of Japan.
Although Japan has a huge creative influence around the world, much of their inspiration is taken from the outside world. In 2012 this led to 500 people attending a black market event on the backstreets to buy internet goods. The idea came about when the organisers had their iPhone app rejected by Apple, and so they brought the internet to a real place where people could buy and sell stuff. Black market has a dual meaning – ‘darkness’ as well as ‘fetish / obsession’ – which only increased the intrigue. Fifty groups set up stalls to sell goods only relating to and unique to the internet. This underground community found Facebook and Twitter so structured and restrictive that they have instead created a restriction-free black market – to minimize the frustration. This allows freedom to the group, and – after all – freedom is why the internet should exist.
W+K Tokyo Lab left us with some notes for agencies and clients alike. Know who you are. Know what your strengths are. Know what is inspirational to you. Continue to be passionate about that inspiration and to create things with it. Be part of what you love.
Next up Will Sansom from Contagious brought us “Every Second Counts”. Sansom discussed the concepts of time – be it movable or fixed time. He started with the quote, “The web is the only four-dimensional media” coined by Joanna Wiebe (User Experience Designer), with time being the fourth dimension.
We hang on time. Look at how long it takes to upload something on the web, download a document or a general load to watch something. We’re all aware of time, and particularly digital time. We value our time. It takes us 400 milliseconds to blink. Nowadays if a website is 250 milliseconds slower than another site people are likely to be impatient enough to move elsewhere. Now that’s quite mind-boggling. People are likely to jump sites to a competitor based on this ¼ of a second. Wow.
Do we make time elastic? Do we package it up to share it in the future? Yes, we do, and we do cheat time. We sacrifice it for now for the future. Why do we document everything on our phones these days? For example, now we enjoy someone’s birthday with us all taking pictures on our phones and uploading them to Instagram or Facebook to enjoy in the future. It’s not about enjoying the birthday right now in the present and savouring that celebration.
Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems longer than any hour. That’s relativity”. So why today do we race so fast? Is it ever going to slow? At the moment, it doesn’t look so. We live in a complete saturation of multi media competing for our attention. And it looks like it will just continue to intensify. And thus brands need to get on this time train. Brands must compete for consumers today for their time just as much as they need to compete for the money they will spend.
Young people now switch media platforms on average 27 times per hour. So this has a huge impact on purchases of client products. We have today a digital urgency. Over 60% of people today use their phone for information on what product they will buy, where they will buy it and at what price.
“Marketplace for Moments” is how and when differentiating brands now use technology to connect to customers at the precise moment that counts. Brands need to offer something of genuine interest. This exponentially increases the amount of time people spend with your brand.
“Augmented Experiences” is thinking about things in multiple dimensions. It’s about tapping into the increasing human behaviour to multi-task across multiple media channels. A brand’s focus is to think about the money (and more money) the customer will spend with you now and also in the future.
Sansom left us with three key statements to go home with:
Expediate or engage – focus relentlessly on adding value, whether by offering most elegant means to an end, or enhancing and deepening the user experience.
Manufacture serendipity – look for the moments that matter in the customer journey and establish a legitimate, consistent claim to them.
Be Creative with time – it’s a hugely adaptable tool that can help manifest and heighten ideas that are personal, precise, provocative and playful.
First up after lunch was Adam Ferrier, Co-Founder of Naked Communications, who brought us “Harnessing and Empowering Creativity to Effect Community Change”. Ferrier would have preferred his talk to be called “Harnessing Science and Creativity to Effect Community Change”. He would actually like Spikes Asia to be called the Festival of Science and Creativity, because with it just being The Festival of Creativity the ECD and the creative agency are becoming somewhat redundant. Creativity left on its own creates risk. More on science later.
Most brands have a community around them that ties people together. Those ties may be weak, they may be strong, they may bring about success, they may bring about sales. Brands can offer up an opportunity for collective action, and that is when creative solutions have transformed the community as a whole. Effectiv
e advertisers will steer this consumer behaviour toward the change they want to achieve. They need to of course choose behavior that is changeable as well as use behavioural spurs requiring motivation and ease. In essence, brands need to strengthen the ties of the community, and use creativity to transform this community behavior.
Ferrier (left) went on to say that ‘Collectivism’ is a movement that prioritises human interdependence, stressing the importance of cohesion within a group. He believes collectivism is ¾ science and ¼ creativity. Science is derivative, and finds out an understanding of things, seeing validations in categories.
We take a step back to look at the social science of the 1960s. Back then there were no ethics committees. Lots of fun, interesting experiments were happening. We can break down these into quarters:
Science obedience. When scientific experiments take place, those who are asked to do something by someone in authority would blindly walk into it and do it. If somebody tells you to do something people invariably will.
Science conformity. 60-80% of people undoubtedly go along with the conformity of a group. We herd like people. We copy via ‘social learning’. We are hardwired to accept our in-group.
Science action. If you get people to act first, they will change their thoughts and feelings to match that action. That’s the power of cognitive dissonance. If you want people to do something, don’t necessarily ask them, but ask them to ask someone else to do something. Action changes attitude much faster that attitude changes action.
Creativity Purpose. This is where a small task can take on a significant position. Give people a higher sense of purpose.
Ferrier presented a case study showing the toilet paper brand Who Gives A Crap. They donate 50% of their profits to charity. To create the first campaign and get some hard needed monies donated, Naked used the CEO of the company to directly ask people for cash. They made it appear that people were already donating to the phenomenal cause. They wanted to give everyone a ‘Feel Good’ toilet experience every time.
This campaign raised $50,000 within 50 hours. Naked gave consumers the following:
a) Let people in on what you are doing – Create a Live Stream.
b) Thank people who donated – The Honour Roll
c) Show quotes, show HD Images – Content for Bloggers and The Journalists
d) Create a sense of urgency – include a Live Counter
e) Get the cash – Enable Donations
f) Allow corporate logos to appear – Sponsorship Bar
g) Allow the consumers to talk to you – Socially Enabled Comment Thread
To sum up, to change community, brands and advertisers need obedience, conformity, action and purpose.
Anita Caras, Head of Consumer Insights for Global Agency & Accounts at Microsoft brought us “Digital Divas: How Women Are Leading A Cross-Channel Shopping Revolution”.
The largest growing economic force in the world isn’t China or India – it’s women. WOOHOO!
By 2014, the global earning power of women will reach 18 trillion dollars. Wowzers. Females still lag by 25% in internet access, but drive growth in e-commerce. Globally, women represent nearly two-thirds of the untapped market for mobile growth.
Caras looked at a global case study carried out with Ogilvy, segmenting women based on their digital confidence, connectedness and influence.
Findings revealed that on average, Digital Divas make up 18% of users, Mainstream Users 50% and Digitals Outliers the remaining 32%. Digital Divas are the most connected women on the planet. Looking across the globe, Digital Divas are at their most populous at 22% in Russia, 23% in Saudi Arabia, and 26% in the UK.
Divas are most likely to be young, employed and urban. They are technologically fearless. They use and own multiple devises. One in five has more than 900 contacts or more, and they share their content with other women online. They express themselves online in ways they could never dream of expressing themselves when offline. One in four adopt an online identity. 73% of Divas sleep with their mobile phone (wow!), and this often leads to a loss of up to two hours sleep per night through staying up late using their digital devises (double wow!). Many feel that a life without their digital device would be like life in the dark ages. The mobile phone is the business partner, rather than the lover.
Digital devices have totally transformed how Divas shop. They are online buyers, not just online shoppers. 75% of Digital Divas buy online though their digital devices. They feel it’s fast, fun, easy, social, relaxing, spontaneous, exciting, controlled, transactional and rational. It’s opened them up to buying products they had never seen before. On the other hand, it can be overwhelming and challenging. It would be good to have something to help cut through that digital clutter. They want a clear, clean and optimal shopping experience. Divas are decision makers. Often they would rather talk to their mobile phone rather than an in-store sales assistant. Even if Divas go to the physical shop to see and experience the product, they may well go back online to make the final purchase.
There are seven traits that savvy brands should heed and represent. Brands must be: curators, facilitators, problem solvers, synchronizers, co-creators, experience enhancers and deal makers.
Caras left us with six key takeways:
1) Target the alter egos
2) Edit and eliminate: structure choice
3) Put the therapy back into retail therapy
4) In-store = opening the experience not just closing the sale
5) Gamify to electrify
6) Create a sense of mastery
Ultimately 7/10 Digital Divas say that their digital devices have brought them closer to brands. These women are not to be ignored. Remember these Digital Divas are digital detectives and they want a lot from their brands online. Sit up and take note.
Last up today I took in Chris Clarke, Chief Creative Officer of DigitasLBi who brought us “Is The Internet Making Everything Shit?” Clarke set out to dispel the myth that the internet has put the consumer in charge. It’s thanks to digital technologies that people are in fact more controlled than controlling and, in addition, the internet business models have devalued creativity. Clarke wants the agencies to provide more creative inspiration allowing brand survival, and proactive roles in the global community.
In terms of quality, brands are increasingly under pressure due to our ever-decreasing attention spans. Agencies and clients are finding it more and more difficult to get our attention, which has forced a downward spiral in the quality of content, yet of course the proliferation of media and media channels is going up.
Clarke posed the question: is digital creating opportunity, or destroying economic dignity? Look at Kodak (ha ha ha ha remember film?) – they employed 140,000 staff, with revenues in the billions. By comparison, Instagram employs 13 people, has a revenue of $0 and was recently bought for $1 billion. Today it’s Winner Takes All. The cult of “free” has the capacity to destroy quality and destroys jobs.
In 2010, people generated 200 billion GB of data. 90% of the world’s data is less than two years old. Isn’t that amazing? By 2050, 50 billion devices will be connected. There is a real danger that power will be concentrated in a tiny number of geeky hands. We have to take back our stories and our ownership to avoid a total collapse. It’s a dangerous time for humanity. But of course there are opportunities out there. Technology isn’t bad. The internet isn’t bad. It’s just how we approach it. We need economic responsibility. We are entering an age of real potential with data, with data rich companies such as Hail, TripAdvisor and Spotify. They don’t give away their products for free.
So there is an incredible role for brands to be helpful with technology and data. Brand + agency + great idea = economic regeneration. We looked at case studies by Amex and Sony.
Clarke wants the agencies to provide more creative inspiration allowing brand survival, and proactive roles in the global community. He tells us that as creatives we must make a case for chaos, for dirt, for the imperfect, or we face a future where we inhabit propaganda; where our dreams become a shopping mall.
Digital technology has the power to liberate. It also has the power to enslave. It’s up to us. Heavy stuff indeed.
It’s time now for me to attend the Media Monks Welcome Drinks, followed by the Campaign Brief, Song Zu, Source E Creative, Arcade and Sweet Shop sponsored Legendary Drinks – to kick off Spikes Asia 2013. I suspect there might be some very sore heads in the morning.
Claire Davidson, Executive Producer ASIA & MENA @ The SweetShop, reporting for Campaign Brief Asia at Spikes Asia 2013