Ron Samuel’s daily diary from the inaugural Emergence Creative Festival in Margaret River

Ron Samuel from Cooch Creative in Perth is currently down in the Margaret River wine region of Western Australia attending the inaugural Emergence Creative Festival. Samuel (pictured left with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai) wrote a daily diary for Campaign Brief Asia.

Day 1: Cape Mentelle – Beautiful location. Balmy night.

First impressions count and Cape Mentelle winery on a balmy summer evening is very impressive. The mood was festive and some of the good folk had obviously made an early start, everyone else seemed intent on catching up. It was great to be among such a diverse group of people, filmmakers, web entrepreneurs, surfing entrepreneurs and a smattering of ad folk. 

The bar was a distraction for the Film Showcase which was a shame as there was some great talent on display. The evening was very well organised and even though the crowd went through all of the evening’s wine (300 bottles) in about two hours it didn’t seem to slow anyone down.

Breakfast this morning at beautiful Gnarabup Bay (left) was well attended although some were conspicuous by their absence. We shared a table with Laurie Smithdale owner of the popular Seabreeze website and had a chat about the weather while the champagne cork popping film competition was getting under way on the beach.

Day 1 Highlights

Meeting the Seabreeze guy.

Meeting some of the international guests.

Cape Mentelle.

The beach.

No hangover

Day 2:

When you start the day with breakfast at beautiful Gnarabup Beach your expectations are high for the rest of the day, even though some of the delegates had problems ’emerging’ from the previous night, it was well attended.

I always come to events like this looking for value not inspiration. By value I mean learning new things, exchanging knowledge, market intelligence, discovering trends or anything else that will add value to our business.

The venue was Leeuwin Estate, lovely as always. The first speaker was  Bill Tai the sponsored kite surfing venture capitalist from Silicon Valley and he was definitely a highlight.

He has built a community of start-up digital companies from people attracted to his Mai Tai networking event in Maui which attracts kite surfers and start-up folk who get together and kite surf. Some of these companies have become hugely successful.

He said that he is now having more success investing smaller amounts in lots of smaller companies rather than a big lump in one or two.

Part of this is attributed to the speed at which digital technology is defining what will happen next so you need to spread your bets. He discussed how important it was to learn from failure and to keep failing until you get it right. Easy to say if you’re not going to lose your house.

He’s sharp, fit, successful and seems to have blended lifestyle and business very well. I don’t get much work done when I’m surfing with my mates.

The failure theme carried through to the panel discussion on creativity and innovation except the advice was bit more succinct – if you’re going to fail do it quickly. The importance of developing a creative culture was highlighted, something that seems to have been embraced more by our clients than our industry.

The panel was constructive in its advice saying that creativity needs to be supported by process that leads to commercialisation, in other words you’ve got to know where the money is going to come from before you start something.

Next up was Adam Ferrier from Naked who was filling in for Agnello Dias from Taproot India, who had a nasty case of the measles. I wish Agnello all the best but Adam was great. His topic was changing behaviour, which is what we are trying to do much of the time. He was engaging, insightful and left everyone with an idea of where to start. He was the standout speaker of the day for me.

The digital debate panel was interesting but it would have been nice for Othman Laraki, ex VP of Twitter, to have his own space to talk more about Twitter and how they actually make money from all those Tweets.

Perth’s own Mark Loveridge from Adaptor shared his view of the future saying that IP is becoming more valuable than the process used to create it due to commoditisation of the technology. In other words everyone will be able to make stuff so what you make is more valuable than what you made it with.

Adam Ferrier joined the Social Mapping panel after lunch, which I think, saved it from drowning in ambiguity.

The band panel discussion, later in the evening, about music licensing showcased some of the outstanding musical talent down here with hands on advice on how to get heard.

It would have been good to have given this task to the social media experts at the beginning of the festival and see how they fared by the end, nothing like a live case history to prove a point.

Day 3:

The final day began with a 6.30 fun surf session and surf lessons, for those who wanted to try, at Margaret river mouth. The weather was a little ugly and the surf was sloppy but that didn’t stop the brave participants. I found myself chatting and surfing with two very friendly locals who turned out to be Olympian Shane Gould (pictured below) and pro-surfing legend Josh Palmateer. Josh’s enthusiasm got everyone motivated, he generated enough energy to power a small town. Lovely guy and his energy seemed to set the tone for the day.

The first session was Richard Bullock, an ex perth creative who went on to global success and is now a film director based out of Perth. Being in Perth hasn’t stopped him working on major projects and documentaries. He used his life experience to discuss how to face change and embrace the unknown, taking risks and following your instincts. A lot of his work is now based around social causes and trying to get big brands involved which he has been very successful at. The change message was not lost on the people from Perth agencies.

Next up was Shane Walter who described himself as a curator of digital art. He discussed the importance of replenishing your talent supply to create collaborative creative communities. The work that he used to demonstrate his point was stunning in scale and execution. He stressed the importance of taking yourself to the people you want to interact with instead of waiting for them to come to you and also to keep connected to you audience. I think PIAF should definitely put him on the card for next year. His description of  code being the raw material for digital artists as clay is to sculptors helped to demonstrate the limitless possibilities of digital art. He showed work that he’d been involved with for bands like The Rolling Stones and U2, amazing.

Mike Rosenstein (left), who is the produ
cer from Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films, gave a very constructive presentation on where TV is headed using their web series Burning Love as an example. He went through the business case, revenue model and the lessons that they have learned along the way. This stuff was invaluable and the speed at which TV consumption habits have shifted in the states would make me very nervous if I were in the industry in Australia. All of the big web players, like Amazon and Yahoo, are now involved in production and distribution, they know exactly where the audience is and can reach them effectively with stuff that they want to see, gold.

I’m always surprised by the people who leave Perth, do great things and then come back when they can live anywhere else in the world. Simon Allen, an animator who worked at Pixar on films like Toy Story 3 and more recently Brave, which has received an Oscar nomination, is one of those people. He took us through the animation process and by the end you could see why it takes so long to make them. The cost is unbelievable at around $100,000 for five seconds of completed animation with an average budget of $200 million. They produce between three and five seconds a week.

Guy Gadney was next, he’s just been nominated for an Emmy, his take on the future of broadcasting was also very insightful. He used his company’s latest work ‘ The Great British Property Scandal’ as an example. This was TV specifically designed to influence the government to seriously address the issue of homelessness. Viewers were asked to spot abandoned government owned houses, photograph them and upload them, the TV crew then went to those councils and asked them the hard questions. He described it as a ‘transmedia’ production.

The two final sessions were panels and they were both great. The discussion (left) on the use of social media campaigns and some of the tragic results that we don’t see demonstrated that the influence which they create is not always good. Tobias Wilson shared his experience on what is happening with marketing on mobile phones, which is another change that our clients need to be seriously engaging with sooner rather than later. The second panel about brand connection and story was focussed on engaging the target rather than selling them something because they just don’t buy like that anymore. Scott Alexander from Oakley gave a simple piece of advice that none of us should ignore – ‘If you want to get likes on Facebook do something that everyone likes.’ Nice.

The final dinner was at Leeuwin. The food and wine were excellent and the casual set-up worked very well. I think that the Emergence team have created an event that will grow and that has the potential to make a real difference to our creative and business communities. The diversity of the delegates was refreshing and most of the creative organisations in Perth were there in one form or another. The PADC was conspicuous by its absence and should have a series think about next year.

The overriding themes that emerged (sorry), were the need to embrace change positively, let go of the stuff that’s not working, stay connected and get among the markets that you want to be in.

Ron Samuel is founder and creative director at Cooch Creative, Perth. He is a regular delegate at AdFest.