Leeuwin Estate, Margaret River
Adam Ferrier of the Gruen Tranfer is lying in the shade of a ute, on the lawn of the Leeuiwn Estate. We’ve just heard his keynote presentation at the inaugural Emergence Conference, Margaret River, 2013.
I’m feeling a bit star struck by larrikin stories this boy from Perth has about the hijinks he’s pulled on the public, with playmates like American Express and Coke. I really want to say g’day but fear the gulf between his Bansky-wielding power campaigns and my advertorial on all things local and customized, might just prove too great to bridge.
The self-dubbed anti-conference brought 16 keynote speakers from around Australia, and around the world, to a remote winery in rural WA, to discuss the links between emerging communications technologies, creative content, and entrepreneurial strategy.
Between the presentations, panel debates and Q&A’s, Team Emergence did a great job of showcasing all that is enviable, in terms of lifestyle, in Australia’s regional South West. Live music in vineyards; big screen entertainments under the southern cross, bubbly on the beach, the pre-office surf, and the sundowner with mates at the Tav.
morphing hero image from emergence website
My favourite exhibition of real life WA, though I’m not sure it was actually scheduled – and I don’t think many in the audience even noticed, was the giant ant that crawled across Larry Lopez’s laptop, startling the venture consultant from Silicon Valley, and almost putting him off track.
The conference was definitely a worthwhile trip up the coast for our regional based startup. It was very inspirational to hear from the star line up of digital dignitaries: movers and shakers from the halls of Twitter, Pixar and Paramount – to drop only the most household names in the room. We heard from engineers, advertising creatives, film makers, producers, directors, animators, venture capitalists, and more.
Speakers told their personal and inspirational stories of how they journeyed from analogue to digital, and beyond! Resistance to change, on the one hand, and the disrupting effects of the ever-crashing waves of new innovation, on the other, were the obstacles that had to be overcome in most of the stories told. The secret weapons of defense, touted most often, were creativity, passion, courage, bounce back, and an authentic connection to people, their experiences, and their problems.
Adam Ferrier presenting at Emergence Conference
In Adam Ferrier’s presentation of work produced at Naked Productions, he told us he was about to show us a video clip, but first posed the question ‘how did we know before we even made this video that people would want to watch it?’
A heckler suggested it may contain cats and I thought that would probably be the right answer, but it wasn’t in this case. The film we saw was a montage of homemade snippets of adolescent males whose friends had filmed them squeezing their own pimples. It was an advert for Oxy face-wash for men.
The video content was disgusting. It was hard to watch but even harder to forget. What could make for better advertising? However, to be controversial, or offensive was not the point being made to the audience at Emergence.
The point, in this case, was that these videos already existed in the online sphere. They were shared on YouTube and Facebook and in some cases had up to 100,000 shares and likes. The Naked agency simply put the clips together to the theme tune of Flight of the Bumble Bee, and paid the young men featured $100 each. It was ridiculously cheap and they knew people would watch it because people already were watching it. As Adam explained, “The biggest predictor of future behavior is past behavior”.
Views of pimple video on Youtube
How do you change behavior? That was the theme of the presentation, and in a world where audiences can avoid advertisements, how do you make a young man want to watch a pimple wash commercial?
It wasn’t a crystal clear take home for me at the time. I struggled, even after a brief chat with Adam, to make sense of how I could possibly connect his highly left field and amplified, show stopping activities with my own very modest attempts at promoting features and benefits at Open Copy, Denmark. However, in restrospect, I see these stories from far-flung battle fields of glory and success are, at their best, stories of problems solved.
So, perhaps, regardless of the size of your budgets, your audiences or your brands, you just need to keep focused on the problems people are coming to you with, and chart your way to bigger things, one solution at a time.
Bring it on.
