A round-up of my experiences at Spikes Asia 2015

Having just returned from Spikes Asia with Jimi Gu, our Shanghai Studio General Manager, I wanted to share the buzz and creativity from the event.  Spikes Asia is where Asia Pacific’s creative community comes together for a spectacular three-day celebration of creativity in communications. From forward-thinking seminars by the industry's most influential figures to superb networking events, training and exhibitions of the region's best creative work, it's an opportunity not to be missed. 

Virtual and Augmented Reality Technology featured high in the biggest keynotes on the main Inspiration and Discovery Stages, most notably starting with The Creative Realities of Virtual Reality.  Andrew Benett, global CEO of Havas Worldwide and Havas Creative Group also shared the data from Dos Equis "World's Most Interesting Man” VR campaign.

Virtual rollercoaster simulator

Hakuhodo Creative Directors, Takahiro Hosoda and Kazuaki Hashida, shared the Yahoo Trend Coaster, this is the world’s first virtual rollercoaster simulator, generating a ride in tandem with changing waves of the popularity of a keyword used in social networking service postings. The user provides a keyword and sits in a car that can move under hydraulic power, wearing an Oculus Rift headset. The system builds a track based on the popularity of the user’s keyword, and they enjoy the virtual ride! Hakuhodo also showed Eye Play The Piano, a collaborative project with the University of Tsukuba’s Special Needs Education School for the physically challenged and FOVE headset, supports each and everyone’s freedom of expression by allowing one to play the piano without the use of hands and arms and instead through the use of eye tracking FOVE VR headset.

The possibilities of VR

This hunger for VR at Spikes Asia guaranteed a full house at my keynote, in which I explained how, in the past 2 years, these new VR and AR technologies had helped grow Happy Finish into a global company.  I started my talk by playing the Google Expeditions video, to demonstrate my passion for VR and the endless possibilities it has to teach, entertain and inspire.  Happy Finish didn't work on this particular project (we’d love to!), but it showed how VR is creating opportunities in many areas and not just in advertising. I jokingly told the audience that Ogilvy Founder, David Ogilvy had once famously said, "Don't tell my mother I work in an Advertising Agency. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house!". Of course, I'm proud to work in Advertising, but it's genuinely exciting to see where these new advancements in technology might take us.

VR campaigns and ROI

In light of this I shared with the audience how world leading brands and agencies are now maximising the opportunities that the advancements in this technology brings them, by partnering with Happy Finish to deliver immersive content experiences, notable examples include Mercedes, Skoda, Honeywell, Subway, River Island and Becker Beer. I also posed the question, ‘Is Anyone Watching?’, which looked into the fact that while many agencies want their clients to commission VR campaigns, the clients themselves can understandably be concerned about the ROI and wonder who will see the campaign at this time when there isn’t a VR headset in every home. So to bring this point to life I referenced a fact found in Google’s Blog, which states that, "Coca-Cola’s 360 video celebrating the 100th anniversary of their iconic bottle design outperformed standard in-stream video ad view-through rates by 36%.” - pretty outstanding I think everyone would agree.  The article goes on to inform us that Bud Light became the first advertiser in the US to launch 360 video running in TrueView ads. Both these facts point to the fast growing consumer appetite for 360VR and the fact that many world-leading brands are already embracing VR to develop the way that they engage with their audiences.

The rise of Big Data

Big Data was very much at the centre of discussion at the event. Senta Slingerland, Director of Brand Strategy at Lions Festivals told her audience about The Creative Data Lion, the latest Cannes Lion Award Category which awards campaigns that use data as an enabler for creativity. She commented that this category could not have existed only a couple of years ago. Fareeda Cassumbhoy, Chief Strategy Officer from Hylink also told of smart solutions driven by data insights and commented that data mining and nuanced analysis will be the weapons of tomorrow for digital planners today.

My key takeaways from the event were the blend of emotive ideas, creativity, technology and data, enabling brands to think bigger and tell the story more creatively and compellingly than ever before. Happy Finish is at the forefront of VR, helping global brands and agencies to deliver these new immersive experiences by combining the latest technology with an experiential content approach which not only immerses the consumer, but tracks consumer behaviours, therefore generating ROI for brand campaigns.