AWARD’s This Way Up Creative Festival was held at The Ovolo Hotel Sydney from August 16-18 2022. The festival brought the industry together for the first time in years and was centred around a lineup of speakers from agencies, consultancies, world-famous galleries and some of Australia’s biggest brands.
Robbie Brammall, MONA’s Director of Marketing and Communications, kicked off the speaker events with an entertaining keynote showing us the Mona Bona, explaining the asymmetric upside of risk and David Walsh’s dreaded fear that marketing would ultimately result in MONA drifting toward the middle.
Just as we regathered our senses, James McGrath, interviewed by Lilian Sor, postulated that ‘worry was actually optimism at work’. A predictably thought-provoking chat that also addressed risk, or lack thereof, by claiming that we are so concerned we don’t get things wrong, we’ve forgotten how to get things right.
And so, This Way Up speaker events kicked off brilliantly. Over the next few days a packed audience of over 200 people also heard from:
- An expertly chaired CMO panel from mi3’s Paul McIntyre
- The Aunties spoke for the first time, introduced by Lindsey Evans from Special Group, and supported by raucous cheerleaders in the audience
- Karen Maurice-O’Leary and Jay Morgan from Meta, demystifying the metaverse
- Mundanara Bayles, Co-Founder of BlackCard, with a highly eloquent and emotive address on leadership songlines
- Dave Bowman from Google, moderated a fascinating AWARD Work Behind the Work session including Suncorp’s ‘One House for Many’ with Leo Burnett and VW’s ‘GTI Hijack’ campaign with DDB
Keynote speaker Neil Heymann, Global CCO of Accenture Song and AWARD Awards Jury President, closed the speaker events with an insightful and entertaining talk on The Evolving Art of Persuasion: How to build teams and sell work in an ever-changing creative world. We learned many things – his daughter Ruby hates ads and five very annoying questions that help create better work.
This Way Up also included sold-out educational workshops:
Mundanara Bayles hosted two exceptional Cultural Capability training workshops.
The AWARD Craft workshop, curated and chaired by Jonathan Kneebone from The Glue Society, took 25 midweight creatives through pitching processes and helped streamline and simplify them.
Over two days delegates were mentored by Ant Melder (Cocogun), Julian Schreiber (Special Group), and Barb Humphries (The Monkeys) and walked away with tangible frameworks and techniques to reach unexpected conclusions fast. Register your interest for 2023 here.
AWARD and CPC ‘Great Work needs a Great Producer’ was a sold-out half-day workshop for producers and account managers who heard from Martin Box (EP, Airbag and CPC Co-Chair) and Karen Bryson (EP, Collider) about some invaluable industry tips and tricks to make shoots more efficient and effective.
Delegates then broke into groups to breakdown scripts into a production schedule, with the help of experienced EP’s from other CPC member agencies.
For more information about this and other CPC courses, register your interest for 2023 here.
It was certainly a mind-expanding three days in Woolloomooloo.
