Ron Samuel’s flashbacks from AdFest 2017

Former judge and AdFest veteran Ron Samuel (pictured left) details his flash backs from AdFest 2017.

Day 1

I clearly remember arriving in Bangkok on Tuesday afternoon, meeting Kim Shaw at the airport, getting into the mini-bus and being handed my first Singha Beer. Then it was Wednesday afternoon.

Day 2

The first speaker was a highlight today. Claudia Cristovao from AKQA in Tokyo talked about content without sounding like an over amped digital evangilist. The context of her talk was simple, very relevant and we finally had a digital person discussing the stuff that we all suspected must be happening in cyberland. Such as people like you and me reaching peak content or, as I like to call it, content fatigue, where we are taking longer and more regular digital breaks, downtime from devices and doing things that we enjoyed in our pre-web existence. Yes, even the millenials are doing it, whilst sharing the experience on social media.

She revealed that 93% of Twitter posts are re-tweets so a lot of sharing but very little actual creation by comparison. Users are sending increasingly greater amounts of content straight to the digital graveyard as our attention spans drop to less than that of a goldfish.

The key for brands is to create better stories, as Claudia put it ‘The better story the more you connect’. Easy to say but much harder to do in reality because we all know how hard it is for clients to resist putting ‘a bit more sell’ into the story, which then dies before taking its first digital breath. She also challenged the media strategy of reaching as many people as you can when research showed that in many cases you only need to influence a small percentage who will then influence behaviour through a shared experience or impression. The problem as I see it will be waiting for that influence to take effect and deliver, another challenge for clients.

Claudia’s presentation dovetailed nicely into the Google and Youtube chat from Phu Truong at Google. He also gave some great examples of what a good story should look like and how they can so effectively connect when they are actually told as a story not a sales piece. His most memorable quote was ‘one size does not fit all’ and we need to stop thinking like that just because it’s easier and probably cheaper.

For us creative folk it means that our story telling skills are more valuable than ever and cannot be replaced by AI or ASI or anything else, yet.