2014 Attendees

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Freddie Coltart

Senior Creative
FCB New Zealand
Auckland
, New Zealand

Comments

Firstly, I'm not much of a writer, so excuse any grammatical errors, and secondly, I've been in Vegas for eight days so my brain is squashed turds.

I've just spent the week attending the London International Awards "Creative Conversations" in Las Vegas. Vegas was much of what you'd expect, a city of 600,000 all trying to jam hedonism down your throat for maximum profits.

Fortunately, ‘Creative Conversations’ was quite the opposite.

Throughout the week we saw a wide variety of great speakers, highlights included:

• Daymond John - Who spoke of founding his clothing brand FUBU, and being one of the "dragons" on the American version of "Dragons Den" (the UK version's better, by the way).

• Ralph van Dijk from Eardrum Sydney passed on valuable insights on how to take radio ads to their very best.

• Amir Kassaei from DDB Worldwide and Rob Reilly from McCann Worldgroup (separately) imposed some ad-wisdom on us all the way from the very top.

But for me personally, the best part of the four days was being allowed access to sit in on some of the LIA judging. Seeing the panel analyse the work into such hyper-depths of concept and execution, was amazing. Nothing gets by these guys.

Some quotes from this week to leave you with:

"One great insight is worth a thousand good ideas."

"Technology is a tool, not an idea."

"Enjoy the pain" (in regards to the hard process of making and selling good work)

"'Comfortable' is beige. Challenge yourself."

"No new idea was universally liked by everyone."

"If you have more than one message, make more than one ad."

"For $600 you can go into one of our private rooms upstairs."

Thank you to FCB New Zealand for letting me go, LIA for having me, and Campaign Brief for actually publishing my drivel.