In conversation with Terry Savage as Spikes Asia 2014 begins
The Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity is all set to kick off today in Singapore. This year, the Festival has been increased to four days in addition to the recently launched Tech Talk series at the forum. What is also noteworthy of the event this year is that in its awards component, Digital has surpassed categories such as Print and Outdoor to be the largest participating category at the awards.
Spikes Asia is expecting over 1800 delegates this year from the region, and the Festival organisers informed that the participation from various markets has strengthened.
India has grown this year and both Vietnam and Sri Lanka have strong delegations with in excess of 40 people coming from each country. Mongolian delegates have also registered at Spikes for the first time. “We have seen China emerge as a creative power in the last three years and I am now looking to Indonesia to start to emerge – which is a big market and a strong market at the cusp of delivering at a more sustained level in terms of creativity. We know great work can come from anywhere – it is the ability to produce that great work year after year that is so important,” informed Terry Savage, Chairman, Lions Festivals.
Commenting on the reason for taking the Festival to four days, Mr Savage said, “The rapid state of change that is occurring in our industry means that there are so many areas of learning and inspiration to cover – four days means that we can address more issues and it gives us the latitude in the future to broaden the learnings even further.”
TechTalk would be hosted through the Festival with the objective of introducing future looking technology to delegates.
“Tech and Digital are now totally embedded in what we do and so we must reflect this in our Festival, likewise Innovation. Hence we brought an Innovation category to Spikes. Digital is so embedded into the industry that it is growing year-on-year and will continue to do so. At Cannes Lions, it was the third largest category but still behind, Print and Outdoor. We are also very happy with the growth in the mobile category this year, and we expect it to grow further as the industry adopts mobile advertising,” observed Mr Savage.
Spikes Asia is taking place from September 23-26, 2014.
