Spikes Asia’s inaugural Healthcare jury president June Laffey outlines her judging experience

This year Spikes Asia introduced the new Healthcare category to the awards program. Chairing the inaugural jury was the Executive Creative Director at McCann Health in Sydney, June Laffey. Here Laffey gives her thoughts and advice on this new addition to the Festival.

I feel really blessed to have been asked to preside over the first ever healthcare jury at Spikes Asia., great ideas here can not only improve quality of life – but can save lives.

The Spikes Asia healthcare jury was treated to some great work. Without doubt the APAC region is punching above its weight in this space. There was a lot of work that I personally, hadn’t seen before – even though I’ve been lucky enough to have judged in many healthcare shows this year. The standard was high – and the winners were easy to spot.

Some pieces really moved the jury, such as the Malaysian “Live On” spot for organ donation, and the brilliant “I touch myself” integrated campaign to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer. Other pieces were smart and culturally bang on – such as the Eye Mo water calligraphy work.

And others were crazy good…there’s nothing like geriatric female baseball players keeping strong to make you smile – Center Foul, Center Pitching, Center Jump.

There was a noticeably  low entry rate within the pharma category. This is a notoriously difficult space to create good work in. Not only is advertising to healthcare professionals highly regulated, clients are often very risk adverse… indeed some will not allow agencies to enter award competitions at all, in the name of confidentiality. So when you work in this particular healthcare space , its easy to hide behind the difficulty factor. But you can get good work through – like anything, it comes down to simple ideas, beautifully crafted and a trusting relationship with the client.  When you do get  the good work up – your ideas somehow count for more.  I am particularly proud of McCann Health Sydney’s Simponi gold winning entry in pharma, which was born from a simple insight and a great trusting client.

It should also be said that we need to respect this category. Some entries presented with lazy case studies, which had obviously been created for other categories, and it felt that they had been entered into healthcare as an afterthought – another chance to win at Spikes. If the entrants don’t respect the healthcare category and give their entries the same thought to other categories, it will undoubtedly show in the results.

As the healthcare category grows at Spikes Asia, and I have no doubt that it will, we need to protect the integrity of the pharma section. It can not be swallowed up by the health and wellness entries. As an industry, we need to use the Spikes Asia Festival as a chance for clients and agencies alike to experience and  be inspired by the best work from the region.