PSFK Asia 10 Oct 08 What it is: Conf targeted at creatives on youth trends, social media, creativity and innovation, collaboration, digital democracy and the impact of change in China, with speakers from companies including MTV, NASA, Panasonic and agencies including Flamingo International, Mindshare, Profero and Wieden + Kennedy What works: Short and sweet! 21 speakers, less than 20 min each. Pecha Kucha. I had been to too many bad conferences. Some had CEOs talking about what it’s like to be a CEO to an audience of non-CEOs. I wanted to create an event with quickfire presentations and talks where the audience could use their learnings the next day back at work. What doesn’t work: Crowd is not international enough. Very SF, British, Australian, SGPean. It’s PSFK Asia, where are the Asians? But this is their first, maybe it’ll get better. Local partner Brian Tiong got a lot of SGP creatives to talk, v good, but a tad parochial. SF food, cold sandwiches… What we can use for our next conf: ACM’s Auditorium is cozy. Sit down Q&A style before or after every segment jazzes up the room. Casual dress code. Brochure cum notebook is cool. Presenters work in Pecha Kucha style, short and sweet. Very tight time control. Bloggers encouraged. Multimedia intensive, lots of videos. Lots of breakout times for networking. And most important, smallish group 70+ but mostly interesting people.
Transcript
PSFK Asia 10 Oct 08
What it is: Conf targeted at creatives on youth trends, social media, creativity and innovation, collaboration, digital democracy and the impact of change in China, with speakers from companies including MTV, NASA, Panasonic and agencies including Flamingo International, Mindshare, Profero and Wieden + Kennedy
What works: Short and sweet! 21 speakers, less than 20 min each. Pecha Kucha. I had been to too many bad conferences. Some had CEOs talking about what it’s like to be a CEO to an audience of non-CEOs. I wanted to create an event with quickfire presentations and talks where the audience could use their learnings the next day back at work.
What doesn’t work: Crowd is not international enough. Very SF, British, Australian, SGPean. It’s PSFK Asia, where are the Asians? But this is their first, maybe it’ll get better. Local partner Brian Tiong got a lot of SGP creatives to talk, v good, but a tad parochial. SF food, cold sandwiches…
What we can use for our next conf: ACM’s Auditorium is cozy. Sit down Q&A style before or after every segment jazzes up the room. Casual dress code. Brochure cum notebook is cool. Presenters work in Pecha Kucha style, short and sweet. Very tight time control. Bloggers encouraged. Multimedia intensive, lots of videos. Lots of breakout times for networking. And most important, smallish group 70+ but mostly interesting people.
SGP and the creative spark
PSFK tradition: Start off conference with session on local culture.
Singapore is blank! So (a) Absorb and learn from other cultures(b) That’s why we are free to create.
HK-er: Previously seen SGP as formulaic robots, but in past 5 years it’s changed tremendously. Where did you all come from?
Graham Perkins (Elasticity), Chris Lee (Asylum), Jackson Tan (Phunk Studio), Tad Leckman (Lucas Arts Singapore)
SGP is just starting to output SGPean stuff. We get more hungry the older we are.
Problem with SGP back then, it’s not happening, now it is. Kids now want local identity, you will see this strongly in 10 years time.
Make it with usMark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture/Pecha Kucha) Andew Hoppin (NASA) and Colin Nagy (Attention)
ペチャクチャ Avoid death by powerpoint. 20 slides x 20 sec = 6 min 40 s. Timebox presentations, force a focus, Q&A at the end. Squeeze 14 presenters in, keep energy high, diversity high.
Pecha Kucha took off virally as it met an unspoken need for people to gather around and show each other their work for no particular need, no particular reason. Now in 80 cities! Likeminded ☺
NASA as a slower, ‘older’ govt organization didn’t tap into the energy of the youth, not creating a future of space in the imagination of youth. Andrew pushed for partnerships between NASA and external communities, tech entrepreneurs through Facebook groups, Second Life, Twitter … and learning how to market NASA through blogs, online videos, 3D games.
I found this most inspiring and a good direction that we can learn from to tap on the energy of youth around the world.
In addition to reaching out, Andrew used blogs, internal version of Jabber, Twitter, IMs to see which cross dept groups formed around interests and could push for projects.
CosmosCode for space software for third parties to contribute open source code to NASA projects and share know how with scientists. The sweetener is NASA’s enormous sets of data.
Anxiety in middle class China
奴 When they enter middle class, they get a shock from the pressures of wealth and status accumulation, they cannot escape, and take perverse pride in being a ‘slave’ to mortgage, cars etc.
China youth grow up online, this is their only real space away from pressures of school, society, parents.
晒晒我的生活
Punned after the English word
‘share’, literally it means to share, show off, what I possess
to an online audience.
啃老 refers to youth still living at home not working after graduation.
腐败族 They turn to hedonistic lifestyles to destress from the pressure.
Nick Barham, Wieden+Kennedy
China and Identity Focus is on retro. Retro in the West is post-war 70s counter-culture. Retro in Asia, esp China, is not about culture but about identity.
Retro for Chinese youth is escapist, borrow from someone else’s yesterday to make sense of today. Brands can create a bond with Chinese youth through retro.
Jerry Clode and Floydd Wood, Flamingo International
The Creator ClassPier Fawkes, PSFK founder, Jason Annelo (Yahoo!), Paul Tan (POOL) and Brian Tiong (B-side)
Super Group called the Creator class.
Community
Companies
Creators
those creative individuals who have multiple skills and who have trouble finding their niche. A suggestion was that creators try not to develop too many styles, but rather find one they like and enjoy it. In the process, while finding out all the things you cannot do right, you will find out the things that you can do right.
But I found this a rather closed loop. Brian Tiong sidestep the question “So how will they make real money?”
Jeff Staples and the Accident Jeff Ng, aka Jeff Staples, wrap up cool dude.
A series of fortunate accidents led him from making T- shirts to retail to snowboard clothing design and so on.
