SXSWet Day 2: Urgent Genius and catching Frank
Grant Hunter, regional creative director APAC of Iris Worldwide – who divides his time between Singapore and London – is at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, and reports exclusively for Campaign Brief.
The rain kept on coming down today. It meant more queues, yet again. We had an hour’s wait to get a cab to take us to The Sheraton for our real-time Newsjacking panel. For a while it looked like we might not make it. But eventually we made it to the venue and we were pleasantly surprised by the turnout. Over a hundred and fifty joined us for the session so a big thank you to those who made it out in the heavy rain.
Our international panel featured some of the best work featured from our blog. Michael Logan from Next Media Animation in Taiwan showed some of their greatest hits. The audience lapped up their satirical takes on news events. They ranged from Tiger Woods being attacked by his wife to an epic tech battle between the Dark Lord Gates and the young Jedi Jobs. Visit NMA.tv to view their latest exploits.
We then heard from Remco Marinus, the CD at Lemz, Amsterdam; who created the IKEA365 campaign. They produced a new commercial every day for a year. They went through an intense process that saw them shoot 15 spots every two weeks. They had to write and rewrite again to keep the intensity up. Both NMA and Lemz use an editorial mindset to achieve fresh relevant work in a rapid turnaround process. Both companies are using processes that align with our Urgent Genius philosophy.
Our final special guest, The Bronx Zoos Cobra, was in fine form. We had purchased a 5-star tank with a pretty luxurious bed for her. Unfortunately she decided to take a tour of Austin and proceeded to tweet her every move as she went on the search for food. You can check out some of her exploits on her SXSW Twitter feed. It has kept the audience amused and judging by the number of tweets the snake is as popular as ever.
From a snake that escaped, I jumped to an individual who evaded capture for almost a decade. I attended the Frank Abagnale talk in the Convention Center at 3pm. Frank is the central character in the film Catch Me If You Can. He was probably the U.S’s greatest con man. And what’s even more amazing is the fact that he was only 16 years old when he ran away from home and started his wide-spread trickier. It was a really popular talk and yet again a queue stood in the way between my goal and I.
I was determined to get into the ballroom so I used my best blagging skills to get in. Everyone was queuing to get into Ballroom F but E had another undiscovered door. With the lunchtime beverage wanting to make an early exit it was time for a quick visit to the restrooms. On my return to door E my plan appeared to not be as well thought through as I at first thought. A fierce female sentinel (she was actually a very nice lady) wearing a red SXSW t-shirt stood in my way. I made a plea with the newly appointed guardian of the doors to say that I had just popped out to the restroom. With a little persuasion she begrudgingly let me in. I like to think that Frank would’ve been proud of me. I took my seat on the floor along with hundreds of others. We were instructed to keep the aisles free so after lots of bum shuffling the Health and Safety officials were happy and the session began.
Frank opened with the announcement that his story has been told by many people and all had used a degree of creative spin. So today he was going to tell the story as he saw it. Interestingly he has had nothing to do with the various films and theatre productions about his life, that’s because the FBI prevented him from talking about his exploits whilst he was a government agent.
Frank talked at a rapid pace and he recounted his life story in short engaging bursts. He painted a picture of a young 16 year old kid who had run away from his parent’s divorce. A kid who spotted opportunity and then went on to exploit it. But he was keen to stress that these were the actions of a child. And his actions from the past were those that he would not endorse today. Frank was very remorseful about his story. He now works for the FBI as an security consultant on ideas he could have actioned years ago. As Frank talked it became clear that he regrets parts of his past but is doing absolutely everything to make people re-consider who and what he is. It was a great speech.