keynote day round-up #circusfest part 1
Billed as the Festival of Commercial Creativity, Circus kicked off yesterday in Sydney, day one of a 3 day extravaganza culminating in the AWARD Awards on Friday evening.
There's a fair amount to cover so I'll cut to the chase.
Firstly, the lack of Australian voices (ie none) on keynote day was surprising.
I wonder if that was accident or design?
First up was Jeffrey Cole, from the Centre of Digital Future USC.
Jeffrey described how the lack of behavior tracking in the early days of TV has left big holes in our understanding of how big that disruption was.
His work with USC began around 1998 (correct?) to ensure the same mistake wouldn't happened when the next big communication revolution that came along, the internet, and to spot those trends and transformations early.
Jeffrey's research confirms the likely end of landline phones, newspapers and the current model of pay cable/satellite tv in the very near future, when internet penetration in any territory gets above 30% newspaper circulation declines.
And readers that die do not get replaced.
[Note: I remember the same conundrum may years ago when I worked on the Football Pools...]
Nothing new there but he had some other interesting observations around the things youth think then rethink as they get a bit older.
- They think they are not affected by brands and advertising (but try giving a kid a generic mp3 player vs Apple)
- They think unknown peers are trustworthy.
- They think email is for old people (vs Twitter FB SMS etc).
- They think UGC is better than professionaly produced content.
- They think they will stick with communities (but what ever happened to Friendster?)
- They think there is no more privacy so we should get over it.
[Note: Perhaps there's some social media experts well out of their teens (20's/30's/40's...) who still think this way?]
Over time he reports that these views are reappraised and some abandoned
Some stick forever.
- They do exercise total control over their media
- They don't see news coming from a newspaper
- They will never wear a watch
- They watch TV in places other than the living room
- They take gaming very seriously
- Mobile WILL SOON BE everything (smartphones are already outselling PC, tablets will soon follow)
- They are demanding real vs perceived empowerment
[Note: This is the convergence idea, in principle. New media doesn't simply replace old media, but transforms it]
All good stuff.
Next up was Agnello Dias the ex JWT Mumbai CD now running his own operation Taproot.
This was the highlight of the day for me.
I had honestly never heard of the work he did with The Times of India newspaper.
But hearing him tell the story of how a last minute pre-holiday brief for a minor press ad literally DEVELOPED into a mass movement for social change, that's still rolling was AWE INSPIRING.
If I'm going to be picky then there were one or two layers of cheese on top that could have been left off, but overall it was dynamite.
Won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 08 to boot.
Talk about stand for something your customers care about, this is it personified.
Jess Greenwood from Contagious was great as always.
Lots of examples that back up the convergence/crossmedia notion and the idea of continuous momentum, getting outside of the 'campaign' mindset.
Ina nutshell her pitch was:
Broadcast + internet + location + realworld = bingo
And think about projects not campaigns.
Exaples included Mini Getaway from Sweden (see below) plus Levi’s Braddock workshops, a great example of purpose-driven marketing.
All looking good up to the first coffee break of the day.
But what would follow?..
More in part 2, including a geezer from Google, Rob Campbell and some other stuff.
