Wrapping up the Boards Summit - Amsterdam : Advertising needs to do good to be good

The Boards summit wrapped up last night with a Pecha Kucha talk on how to change the world of advertising, and as usual everyone interpreted the brief a little differently. If we boil down everyones points, the creme at the top is what everyone seemed to touch on during the day: advertising needs to do good to get better.

It felt as if not enough Dutch advertising people were at the Boards Summit to recharge their creative spark, though many from 180 and w+k were represented and Adformatie was everywhere. How often do you get to hear Sean Boyle the Global Planning Director, JWT NY order us to have monkeys on trikes in every presentation? Philips and DDB had a presentation showing the massive change in Phillips advertising (forever known as the impact of Carousel), ending with showing their latest ad which says: ‘There are millions of ways to tell a story. There’s only one way to watch one’. Framestore presented a journey through the 3D of Avatar.
Lunch, with the miniature sandwiches, was another time to mingle as one could sign up to eat with the speakers and thus get some one on one time discussing with them - my personal favorite of the day. Often the best part of these types of conferences is the networking (and gossip) going on at each coffee-break and Boards had wisely made time for many of these, even if they had to spend most of the day trying to catch up the half hour lost at breakfast coffee. All the talks centered on the future of advertising which is changing in every way, from dismantling the agency producer to "embracing ignorance". Inspiring and timely topics.

Many speakers made the point that advertising has to use its creativity for good, but Jeff Kling Executive Creative Director, Wieden+Kennedy, did it as the final remark on the day. Proving once again that he is both a smart smart-alec, and a very entertaining eloquent public speaker. First he made fun of the often misunderstood pecha kucha by starting "I thought we had 20 slides at twenty minutes each" before getting serious:

"Most money in advertising is wasted on self-absorbed, ungenerous messages no one but the advertiser could possibly care about if ads cared to improve the world they would give generously to people rather than just take."

Nick Bailey, Creative Director, AKQA had images of artwork from women artists only, from Helen Chadwic's "Piss flowers" to Jana Sterback's "Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic" showing that they can deal with and view subjects in another way than men, hammering home the point that we need more women creatives in key positions as we're "missing out on 50% of the creativity out there" to the audience's approving applause.

Andy Fackrell Executive Creative Director, 180 Amsterdam showed us creative 180 turns and people who did 180 thinking, landing on his last image where there was a plinth upside down which made the whole world a work of art, thus rendering the artist obsolete.

Perhaps that sums up all the messages of the day, advertising needs to do a 180 - use our selling powers for selling worthy causes, helping our clients to find where they can do good, harnessing our creativity to invent new solutions. All in all, a very inspiring day - and we even got lucky with the weather.