PSFK - Musings and Memories

Looking back, the conference was just one half of the experience. The other half was in the interaction with speakers, organisers and the actual volunteering at the conference.

The first panel that I was lucky enough to attend fully was called Singapore Snapshot, and this examined the design scene in Singapore, the inspiration for local work and what constituted Singapore's brand of design. That Singapore was more international than national, and how important 'hunger' was to progress were a couple of thought-provoking ideas.

Another interesting panel was 'The Creator Class', which examined how young people were diversifying their talents in both the creative and business fields. This is an issue which I find to be very relevant today because this is the class I aim to enter. The merger of the creative and business class into a new diverse professional-artistic class is happening all around me. I see my friends combining their passions and asking, 'why can't we do more than one thing, and why can't we make money out of it?'

The panel on Asian youth trends was also refreshing because it spoke of trend research and analysis as an emerging industry which feeds into and out of the ad world. There was a mention of 'trend scouts' who were people actually employed to keep track of what's happening in the world out there.

Finally, saving the best for the last, of course to an ad person, an ad person's talk was the most inspiring. To say that Rob Campbell's talk on advertising ideas, about how ad agencies should advertise ideas not problems, and brand belief not brand experience was a mild epiphany is not an exaggeration.

Ideas, ideas and more ideas...

After the conference, everyone headed off to Superfamous, to chill out with drinks and talk more about the day's events. For us volunteers, it was both a celebration and an opportunity to mingle and talk more with the people who had put ideas into our heads unknowingly.

Needless to say, I had an enjoyable time talking with Desiree from Bates 141, Achara from Mindshare and Rob Campbell. It was during this chit-chat session that I discovered that Rob was one of the brains behind the Schweppes Burst ad, which has so captured my heart (evidence is found in an earlier post). I also had an interesting conversation with Paul Tan from POOL, to satisfy my curiosity about how a talent agency for creatives functioned.

What was the PSFK conference all about? IDEAS. Big ones. Little ones. Ones that changed the world. Ones that changed an individual life. It made me realise the importance of such gatherings. After all, how often do so many people who contribute so much to the creative industry get together at the same spot to share their thoughts?

The notion of a creative collective has always been repugnant to me, but what is a creative collective? A collective is a group of individuals, and when every member brings value to the group, a creative collective is like a club which you go to beaming with pride.