SPARK - Day Two

I saw the best and the worst of this conference, back to back, in two breakout sessions. Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?

Piers Fawkes from PSFK gave a presentation entitled “Gathering Inspiration for Creative Planning.” By the time it started, it was standing room only. I never would have guessed that watching some guy talk about his favorite websites for an hour would be so interesting. Every planner has a few dozen websites that they visit every day in search of inspiration. Piers has about 500. He shared with us the classic trend and marketing sites that we should already be visiting, along with a few new-school sites that should be on our radar. Here are just a few:

Jean Snow
Notcot
Three Minds
Midwestern Goodness
Make Magazine

Now for the bad news. I was actually a bit excited for Culture vs Consumer, a presentation by Colin Drummond from Crispin. I am certainly not a member of the Cult of Crispin that seems to have emerged in the last few years. Given the title of the presentation, I just thought it would be interesting from a theoretical standpoint. Clearly I was not the only one. The rather large conference room was absolutely packed to the gills. It began with a brief description of Crispin’s attitude towards advertising’s relationship with popular culture. Basically, they’ve given up trying to change consumer’s minds in lieu of trying to change the culture as a whole. An interesting, if not a little grandiose, mission.

Unfortunately, a presentation that started with such an interesting premise quickly became the predicable “look at our cool work” presentation. Campaign after campaign after campaign. In that hour, we saw dozens of advertisements that we’ve already seen dozens of times before - Mini, Miller, VW, Burger King. Thankfully, there hasn’t been so much of the show-and-tell at this conference. In fact, the only two presenters that have given us the hard sell have been Colin Drummond and his boss Chuck Porter.

More tomorrow from the third, and final, day.

Related Tags: AAAA account planning conference

Comments

[Gareth]

Thanks for this Steve - some great sites from Piers.
I'm still amazed by how Crispin try and claim this focus and obsession with culture is new. Not knocking them - they've done some great work - but this is the belief of a lot of the good agencies eg Wieden,Chiat,Lowe. When you think about it this is what the Bernbach revolution was about at DDB in the 50s/60s.
But to be fair to them, I wish more agencies today cared about work in this way - about work that positively effects culture. It staggers me sometimes how we scratch our heads and wonder why people are saying they're liking ads less when we look at the drivel that is 90% of advertising output.
Fill us in on Anomaly tomorrow? And did anyone get the chance to see Mark Earls?