By Psembi Kinstan, executive creative director at DDB Group Melbourne
Last week, I was fortunate to be judging at the 4As advertising festival in Sri Lanka. The festival marked the first time the local industry has celebrated Sri Lankan work for the last 14 years, and the quality of the conversation and enthusiasm of the participants was career-affirming. Far from feeling like an industry event finding its way after a decade in hiatus, there was much here that other ad festivals should take note of.
The festival was led by MullenLowe Group Sri Lanka CCO Dilshara Jayamanna and Shift Integrated CEO Selonica Perumal and came at a critical time for the Sri Lankan industry.
In their own words, “Over the past few years, Sri Lanka has stumbled from crisis to crisis and missed out on invaluable learning opportunities. Like all industries, the ad industry too has been the victim of brain drain and the depreciation of the Sri Lankan Rupee has made it increasingly difficult for agencies to afford to send their teams to international festivals – tickets to Spikes are equivalent to a junior creative’s annual salary.
“Despite these hardships, our country is on a path of recovery, and there’s a renewed sense of optimism and resilience. By launching a festival on par with regional standards within Sri Lanka, we are not just bridging a gap, but reminding our industry that we are in possession of our own unique talent.”
So what could we all get out of the 4As? Here’s the four takeaways that I’ll try to hold onto.
1. World class work isn’t the same as global work
Many of the global campaigns coming out of Asia feel like they could be coming out of offices in Amsterdam, New York, or London. Campaigns such as Singapore’s Heinekicks or the Philippines’ McDonald’s Unbranded Menu could have come from any great global office in the world.
But Ajay Vikram, CCO of Publicis Groupe South East Asia, asked a very good question: Should they? Instead, should our offices strive to do the work our global offices couldn’t: work so uniquely tapped into local culture and insight that it could come from nowhere else?
That’s easier to imagine in Sri Lanka than Australia, but it makes me think we don’t spend enough time thinking about what makes our audiences unique. So on that note…
2. Own your own truth
The best ideas of the festival, either shared in presentations, or in the awards themselves, were all solving specific local problems, or tapping into local cultural practices.
The Indian jurors admitted that the country had adopted a successful formula for Cannes 25 years ago and have stuck to it ever since: find problems so unique and interesting that no creative solution had ever been attempted before.
Sorju Dutt, CCO at Dentsu Creative India, shared Motorola’s Deep Connect, a solution for miners working deep underground outside of mobile connection to speak to their family and tell them they’re safe. Assam Khalid, founder of Vexology UAE, shared BBDO Pakistan’s Truck Art Childfinder.
In a country with limited media coverage, they utilised the local cultural phenomenon of adorning trucks with murals of personalities and celebrities, and changed the portraits to missing children, reuniting seven children back with their families.
Awarded at the festival was Suwa Walan. Across Sri Lanka, women buy clay pots (walan) for cooking, and have a practice of checking the pot for cracks, discolouration, lumps, or any other signs that the pot may break. They used these pots as an initiative to promote breast cancer self-examination with custom clay pots embedded with various physical warnings signs of cancer, and adorned them with traditional artworks depicting the steps for self-examination.
Countless other great ideas with specific cultural insights were shared and unpacked, from the Life Saving Dot, an idea that transformed bindis into iodine patches, to Naming the Invisible, an app that helped the 60 million Pakistanis living as unregistered citizens to receive a Digital Birth Registration.
3. There is no APAC region
Pooja Rawat, EVP of strategy at MullenLowe Lintas Mumbai, discussed the notion of ‘no one India’. Of the 36 different states and territories within India, many have different languages, religions, completely different gender and societal roles and expectations, and therefore completely different relationships with brands.
Pooja shared many examples of brands making work that was strategically opposite for two Indian states.
Again, the conversation came back to finding local truths and insights, avoiding the one-size-redubbed-for-all global approach.
Ajay Vikram built on this, hitting home that Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand have as little in common with each other as they do with Australia, so the very idea of regional brand campaigns is antiquated at best, and destructive at worst.
Sure, Australia is much more homogenised as a population, but writing as someone who hails from remote West Australia, it’s fair to say it’s not nearly as homogenised as we make out in most campaigns.
Perhaps the world of personalisation being unleashed by AI will mean there’s soon more chance than ever for regional insights (I can imagine a world where not all campaigns for West Australians feature quokkas, whale sharks, or jet skis).
4. We all are hungry to see more brilliant populist work from around the world. Not just Cannes work
There was some incredibly populist, creative, and effective work shared by the jurors in presentations. Work that made brands famous and wildly popular. But every juror had the same observation; it’s hard for creatives and marketers to discover populous work from around the world – if it’s not shaped for Cannes.
So how do we as an industry do more to share work that’s creative and successful?
It led to the idea of championing interesting and populist work from outside our region and sharing them regularly in a column, with insider views from local markets, an idea that Mediaweek has backed.
Soon, we’ll launch a new series of ongoing Out Of Our Bubble Creative Reviews, showcasing global work that’s caused a stir in local markets, but doesn’t have the singular goal of winning at Cannes.
Stay tuned for these later in the year and in the meantime, let’s all do more to find and share the best work outside of our tiny pocket of the world.
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See also: DDB Melbourne thinks ‘You’re better off with British Paints’