By David Jenkin

The guest speakers consisted of Nathan Reddy, who sat on the design jury, Jenny Glover, on the radio jury, and Rob McLennan, on the film jury, while TBWA’s Pete Khoury, Karabo Denalane and Julian Ribeiro hosted the discussion. In addition to the key trends to emerge from the festival, the judges each spoke of the challenges in sorting through thousands of exceptional candidates and presented some of the top entries.

Two major tech trends that dominated this year’s festival were virtual reality and artificial intelligence, while themes focused on the value of creativity in today’s world, as well as upending formulaic and traditional ways of thinking.

Nathan Reddy, founder and CEO of Gridworldwide, spoke about how design has moved on from just logos and business cards and is now weaved into all aspects of communication. The entries that made it to the final ten percent were revolutionary concepts, such as fabric used as tech, or a braille watch. “I think the outtake from this is: find the right human insight,” he said; “find the best way to reduce it in terms of the thought, and amplify it on many different platforms.”

Glover, executive creative director at TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris Johannesburg, sought to dispel myths around radio through examples, such as the notion that it can’t be innovative, or that audiences always stop listening after a few seconds. She said that radio was a category in which South Africa was under-represented despite enormous potential.

Rob McLennan, executive creative director of King James II, said that South Africa had, in fact, done very poorly this year in film, as not one entry made the long list. He suggested possible reasons – either matters of budget, craft or writing – encouraging debate but avoiding a definitive answer.

Hunt, who spoke after McLennan, expressed his views as to why this was the case. There was no longer any room for ‘quite good’ television commercials or any other pieces of work, he said; “Either they’re brilliant, or they’re gone.” There is no reward for playing it safe, it does not offer a good return on investment, yet clients and agencies persist in clinging to safe territory. “We check our work for what might annoy a few people. We filter it to make sure it’s okay, and that guarantees that it’s not great.” He said both agencies and clients need to have more courage, otherwise great work becomes watered down, and while agencies and clients feel safe, audiences won’t keep it in their brains for more than a few seconds.

Hunt also said there is a need for greater flexibility in the relationship between client and agency. “I think we have to look really hard at the way we manage the business between agencies and clients, it’s too siloed, too ‘the budget is’… We have to somehow, both agencies and clients, recalibrate how we spend money, how we chase an idea. And sometimes it’s not going to work, but when it works, the return on investment – the hard dosh – is unbelievably multiplied.”

In closing, he said that everything today is merging and borrowing from each other, yet he feels that the industry is staying in its silos and not changing as the media consumption is.

He concluded; “It’s moving so fast that we have to have a new way of bouncing ideas off each other, taking a chance, seeing where it goes, dropping it very quickly if it doesn’t work and spending five times more money on it if it is working. But if everything is static, you will remain static.”

For more information, visit www.tbwa-africa.com. Alternatively, connect with them on Twitter.