I hope that you have arrived back in good condition for 2005.
In some ways, I think that the upcoming year is crucially important for our industry. We really have to build on the growth and resurgence that our industry saw in the past year; we were fortunate in 2004 that we had an Olympic Games, Euro 2004 and a host of economic factors that helped prime the pumps for our business.
Our challenge in 2005 and going forward is making our business more effective and more relevant to our clients. The most significant thing that we can do to help achieve this is to focus and re-focus on the creative product, more than ever. Despite the strides that we have made in the region, we are still lagging behind Europe and the US in terms of the consistent delivery of big creative ideas. Yet we have the talent, youth and innovation to be delivering consistently strong and incisive big creative ideas on a far more regular basis than we are currently doing.
Part of this process can be improved by better strategic training and, therefore, stronger creative briefs.
If agencies are to become more relevant, they have to be genuine business partners with their clients. It's that partnership that more often than not leads to truly breakthrough creative ideas. Big, long-lasting creative ideas are not created in a vacuum, but as part of a process that is shared between agency and client.
Having established the big idea, communicating it to our audience has become tougher, as media has become more and more fragmented. We know that the traditional ways of reaching audiences are no longer sufficient, so it has become incumbent upon us all to ensure that we have innovative ways of not just reaching that audience, but of assessing the value of non-traditional media approaches.
What has been encouraging in the past year has been the way that the advertising awards shows are beginning to recognise the importance and value of non-traditional advertising campaigns, such as Adidas' 'Vertical Football' or the Channel 9 'Missile Car' work in Malaysia. It shows that our industry is recognising (at long last) that communication must evolve if it is to maintain its relevance and importance in an increasingly cluttered media space. This is a very important issue; not just what we say, but that how and where we say it is a far more important part of the message than it has ever been before.
Ensuring we have the tools and methodologies to help us make the correct decisions is a more important part of our job than ever before. I don't believe that this is solely the job of the media agencies. It is just as much a part of the creative process now as it ever was.