Spikes Asia Creative Campus, a one-day learning experience on the transformative power of creativity from some of our industry's sharpest minds in Asia-Pacific, is underway at Singapore's National Design Centre.
Sessions explore the trends shaping today’s creative landscape—from short-form video and online commerce to storytelling, AI-powered creativity, and the influence of local culture on ideas that resonate globally. Celebrating the region’s unique ideas, perspectives, and cultural influence, the Creative Campus showcases how APAC creativity is shaping and inspiring the world stage.
Spikes Asia Creative Campus kicked off with an opening note from Lions CEO Simon Cook, who set the tone by exploring how creativity holds the power to meaningfully shape society and why marketing that matters is more critical than ever. Cook shared a preview of today's agenda, filled with insights, learnings, and intelligence set to define the industry in the year ahead, before turning the spotlight to this evening's Awards Gala.
Below are rolling updates from the day. We will continue refreshing this page; check back often.
Welcome Keynote: How to Win in 2030
Rica Facundo, Lions Intelligence
'We are seeing an attack at every level of human need'
"I have some bad news. It is getting really, really, really hot." Asia is warming at twice the global average, Facundo noted, and the consequences go far beyond discomfort.
"I'm from the Philippines. Living in the broader South and Southeast Asia region, we are at higher risk for what they call compound disasters. That's just a fancy way of saying we are at risk for more extreme weather happening more consistently than any other part of the world."
'It could take 14 years of salary to buy a home'
The pressures don't stop at the environment. Facundo turned next to Asia's housing affordability crisis, one quietly hollowing out the financial security of an entire generation. "30% of Southeast Asians would take on debt or loans to buy a house. 37% will take on debt for immediate funds at the expense of their savings. Six in ten Southeast Asians are in debt."
Even in Singapore, one of the region's wealthiest nations, unpaid credit card balances have hit a 10-year high. "$90.1 billion in unpaid credit card debt. So let's do a collective sigh of relief."
'37% of companies would rather hire AI than a junior employee'
The jobs market, Facundo said, is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and marcomms is not exempt.
"According to the Contagious Radar, 79% agree that the total number of jobs in our industry will decline."
Author Joseph Browning, she said, put it most starkly: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill, while removing the field and ability to access wealth."
"What that means in practice is that the person above you gets replaced with AI. Less opportunity and value are distributed among fewer people. It becomes a race to the top."
So how do brands win? Her answer was clear: "The brands that will thrive will move from creating desire and selling products, to defending needs and becoming a scaffolding for people's lives."
Creators - From Influence to Innovation: Maximising Full-Funnel Creator Partnerships
Jimmy Lee, Head of Global Clients & ANZ Creative Shop, APAC, Meta
- Lo-fi is ‘Hi-fun’. Content doesn’t need to be polished, it can be dynamic and energetic with real talk, points of view and personality rather than overly produced. Entertaining and sometimes surreal, it’s all good.
- Engage in shared experiences with creators. Creators can create their own events, games and activations for local followers to find and engage with. This leads to greater impact.
- Social series can be powerful. Brands are sponsoring short drama series for followers, leading to the “Netflixification of Social”.
Key takeaways
“We have to stop thinking about optimising for social. Let’s start thinking about where the creative space can be on social.... Let’s start exploring working with traditional, conventional influencers. Creators shouldn’t just be a budget constraint, but should be seen as collaborators. They can help you influence your audiences, but more importantly, their agility, their talent, their craft, their ability to move at the speed of culture is what we should be optimising for.”
Panel Discussion: Innovation in Practice: The Brand × Creator Partnership Playbook
Isaac Tan, Chief Creative Officer, Hepmil; yuuno_小琦; moderator: Nicole Tan, Managing Director, Singapore, Meta
With this many stakeholders in the game, how do you stay aligned?'
Scaling creative partnerships, Nicole noted, is where the real complexity lives. Agencies, brands, and. The creators themselves all have different timelines, expectations, and definitions of success. She asked:
"Channelling positive tension is one thing — but when you've got this many stakeholders in the game, how do you stay aligned? Any lessons and wins?"
For Yuuno, it was about protecting her own creative identity. “Preventing ourselves from being algorithm slaves — balancing good content with brand identity. You can buy into a trend and still be yourself. Trendjacking only works when it aligns with who you are,” she said.
Isaac's answer was to build lasting partnerships: “Localisation and figuring out how to work with the right creators without losing nuance,” he explained, adding: “When you work with creators long term, the work becomes more frictionless.”
'A life coach'
Nicole guided the discussion on the evolution of creator relationships. Isaac pointed out that brands work with creators across a wide range of ages.
“We meet them across life stages, so we have to figure out brand partners with authentic storytelling opportunities,” he observed. “Where do you want to be in five years? One creator told me they wanted to get their driver’s licence. Another said he is getting married and moving into a new house. Thinking about creators holistically, mapping that out together with them, is powerful from a marketing standpoint."
'Know the creator's personality—not just their follower count'
Yuuno expressed that genuine alignment is fundamental for brands to be successful in working with creators. She said: “Know the creator's personality, their lifestyle,” she said, adding: “There are still brands that are very rigid with their brand direction and force creators into a mould.”
'Social is in the middle of everything'
Nicole challenged a persistent industry habit: treating creators mostly as a top-of-funnel play. Isaac pushed back with a case study that reframed the entire conversation.
"SCDF (Singapore Civil Defence Force) is one of my favourite clients. Every year, they put out data on emergency versus non-emergency calls and how people are dialling the wrong numbers.”
“What we did was dig into the real challenge, and one year, we found it was really about seasonal moments and how people behave differently throughout the year. We partnered with the right creators and released content at the right time to be top of mind. And the numbers moved: user behaviour changed. Emergency calls actually dropped."
'AI is my film school'
Yuuno's take was personal: AI has raised the creative bar and empowered creators to create across different crafts. She said she uses AI across editing, storyboarding, and VFX.
“With the rise of AI, I've noticed a rise in talking-head videos, where a creator just picks up a camera and talks. That is a non-negotiable human element. Human expression, language, AI can't replicate that.”
'Don't lose touch of play'
Nicole asked what outdated assumptions brands and agencies had about working with creators. Yuuno went straight for the metric everyone is still over-relying on.
"Follower count doesn't matter. Brands should really look at shareability, creative style, and whether the creator's audience genuinely connects with what they create."
"The power of small ideas. The sum of all your creators working together is a great deal,” Isaac said, adding: “Don't lose touch of play.”
Beyond the Hype: Creative Workflows for AI Advertising
Armand De Saint-Salvy, Founder, Supaflr
Live action filmmaker Armand De Saint-Salvy explained the process he uses to integrate AI into film production. He showed a quick experiment using generative AI to conclude that most LLMs generate very similar assets.
“Agentic platforms that require minimal human intervention will give you volume, but also statistical predictability. So the most obvious thing is what it will turn out to be, i.e., slop. If you don’t want slop, don’t let go of your creative teams.”
Going on to explain the actual process of producing with AI, De Saint-Salvy points out that much of the human-led existing production process needs to remain in place such as strategies, planning, pitches, inventories, casting, and locations, all of which need to be explained and listed as AI is used to refine characters, costumes, and sets.
Production in AI is then all in the edit, but you have control over your characters’ personalities.
AI ‘watchouts’
“Showreels full of viral content is not that hard to make. What’s hard to make is stuff that’s specific, where you have a big mandatory list of the things that have to be included. So make sure that [those commissioning the film] are explaining to you their processes, they’re collaborative, and make sure they don’t tell you that anything can be done in AI, because not everything will work.”
“AI is cheaper, but it’s not as cheap as you think because it needs time. And time is people, and people are money. So it’s a creative tool, it does not replace creativity.”
“The big idea, my friends, is back. When you get that $100K budget, and you’re briefed-in, you’re like ‘oh we’re back to two people talking in a room’. Now that room can be smashed by a meteor, you can do that bit in AI and shoot the rest of it as live action. So I see a massive opportunity for creativity because when we’re getting hemmed in with small budgets, we can now think bigger and more crazy. You’re all weirdos, you’re creatives, and that’s the best part, because that’s where the new ideas live.”
Deep Dive Session: The Real-World AI: Building Productive and Safe Creative Workflows
Shinichi Kobayashi, Executive Creative Director, ADK; Tuomas Peltoniemi, Managing Director, Design & Digital Products Lead, Accenture Song; moderator: Atifa Silk, Managing Director, Haymarket Media Asia
Moderator Atifa Silk opened the session by asking how AI can scale across creative organisations.
Tuomas Peltoniemi: “First is the work: how do we arrive at it differently, and what kind of work do we do with AI? Second is the workforce: training, enablement, getting tools into the hands of creatives at every level, from leadership down to clients. And third is the workbench: what tools are you using, what are you building yourself, and how do AI agents play a role in how you actually work?”
'AI unifies ideas at the production stage'
Silk turned to Kobayashi to talk through what AI actually does well and where it falls short. He framed it around AI’s ability to take human emotional states and translate them into visual language.
"Generative AI is good at realising ideas. You can see it in how it takes something abstract and expands it across visual references grounded in human life,” he said, adding, “It has value at the production stage. Creating something that truly moves people—that is still difficult for AI"
Silk asked how creatives in Asia, one of the most diverse regions in the world, can ensure that AI-generated work remains culturally accurate and maintains the soul of a brand.
Kobayashi: "Creating something that truly moves people is still difficult for AI. required more than 600 images to be generated for a single shot because there were so many elements at play: light, shadow, atmosphere, and the arc of motion. Small inconsistencies make a world of difference. AI still struggles to maintain that consistency across a long-form piece."
Silk: Is AI now managing the system rather than doing the work?
Kobayashi: “For truly artistic work, AI is still difficult to control. Like shaping emotional impact, ensuring consistency, managing AI's outputs, those are things only a skilled human can do.” As an example, he talks about when AI is prompted to generate a basketball player, it may generate a film where the person doesn't dribble correctly.
'Architects of quality'
Peltoniemi argued that AI is shifting the role of creative teams rather than replacing them.
"AI changes the role of our designers, strategists, and technologists: they become architects of quality. You're not just executing; you're architecting the experience, generating the ideas, and then purposefully choosing AI tools—whether generative AI or AI agents—to build it.
And on the question of jobs? Peltoniemi: "Creatives who use AI are the ones taking those jobs. Not AI itself."
'Are you using AI to cut costs, or do things you couldn't do before?'
Silk remarked that the CMO Growth Council has wrestled with the same questions from the brand side. What advice did the panel have for clients?
Peltoniemi challenged the common misconception that AI is cheaper. “It’s not as cheap as people think, and it's certainly not free. If you think about the iterations involved, the tokens you burn going back and forth on generative outputs, you can spend a surprising amount of money compared to a traditional production shoot. Time and money are still being used.”
“The question I'd ask every brand is: are you positioning AI purely as a cost-reduction tool, or are you using it to do things you genuinely couldn't do before? I'm much more a fan of the latter — reimagining the way you work, and trying things that weren't possible. That is a far healthier way to think about it than saying: We won't need half our team this year."
Kobayashi: "AI is just a tool. But it is a great opportunity."
Presentation: B2B Marketing That Sticks: Designed for Long Cycles, Built for Memory
Monica Bhatia, Head of Large Customers, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn
'Video is the new language of B2B'
The key theme of Bhatia's presentation is building trust through consistency, not claims. How do B2B marketers sound human, show their thinking, and act in ways that feel real?
Bhatia honed in on the importance of format in expressing brand authenticity. On B2B platforms like LinkedIn, much of the content centers on text, links, and written posts. On the contrary, Bhatia noted that video has emerged the most effective format to reach the vast majority (71%) of B2B buyers today: Gen Zs and millennials.
"Studies show that there is a cognitive difference in how these generations understand complex issues and decode information. In long buying cycles, where people are gathering information and making collective decisions, we have to talk to them in the language they know best."
Bhatia made it clear that video isn't just a top-of-the-funnel tool. B2B marketing, she said, can no longer rely solely on white papers and long-form reports. This means making content in motion that consumers can see and feel.
"Through our research at LinkedIn, we have seen that video influences throughout the funnel: marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and new business deals. Marketers are still speaking to humans. Talking to people in the language they are used to consuming is what makes your brand stick. And memorability drives growth."
Panel Discussion: Looking at the Bottom Line: Proving the Impact of Creativity
Wendy Walker, Jury President, Creative B2B; Jon Stona, CMO, Airwallex; Pooja Dhanothia, Enterprise Sales Director, LinkedIn; moderator: Robert Sawatzky, editorial director, Haymarket Media Asia
What are some of the real viability issues when it comes to doing great B2B creative in practice?
Wendy Walker: "Implementing it can be incredibly difficult. The reality is that we have the desire to do it, but often we can't because of organisational constraints. Whether that's the brand team being completely siloed from the demand programme team, or something else entirely."
"When we look at creativity being proven valuable in a B2B environment, it's usually framed around narrow performance gains. It's almost as if we expect creativity to behave like a spreadsheet, as if we can prove the results of one campaign in a short timeframe and call it done. Creativity helps with relevance, trust, and its value compounds over time."
How much of an issue is consistency when staying committed to messaging and brand symbols across markets?
Jon Stona: "We operate from a challenger brand mindset. I think what often happens is that brands become so constrained that it actually starts to stifle things. That's actually my bigger preoccupation as a leader: how do I create a world where there is actually enough creative agency and room to move?
"What you should expect is that across all the different markets in a region, you are incrementally pushing the boundary in terms of style, tone, experimentation. As a leader, the job is finding that efficient mix of enough consistency, where someone sees something in Shanghai and knows it's from the same brand as what they saw in Singapore, but different enough that we're learning something. The question is: how do we be less rigid, and actually more productively inconsistent in what we're pushing?"
From your experience bringing AI into creativity, what are some of the lessons you've learned?
Jon Stona: "I'm broadly bullish on AI. The use case where AI has actually worked robustly for us is in high-velocity, what I'd call low-stakes content, things like always-on advertising. Where things have not gotten as robust is in high-production quality work.
"We were doing a campaign with Oscar Piastri on a tractor, mowing down a field, set in the 1950s. We priced it out traditionally: go to Lithuania, set up the warehouse, source and commission everything, paint the period-accurate set. Then we priced it out through AI. It was actually around the same cost because the effort required to prompt, iterate, and fix AI outputs to get it right is still significant."
Let's look at the research on emotion in B2B. Where are we actually landing in terms of impact?
Pooja Dhanothia: "We have six generations in the workforce simultaneously. Marketers are targeting all of them. So don't be afraid to experiment with format: take the long-form post when it makes sense, but build a real mix. That mix of formats is what drives relevant emotions across a diverse audience. Sound is also an underplayed white space, and brand-building through audio identity is still very much an open field in B2B."
Looking at the work coming through Spikes Asia and Cannes, are you seeing more emotion come through in B2B marketing?
Wendy Walker: "The brands that are getting it right are the ones that have realised they need to know who they are. What do they want to stand for? What do they want to be known for? What emotional territory do they want to own? That doesn't mean they can't have a locally nuanced approach across different regions, but they have to stay true to that core."
Impact of creators and influencers taking a larger role in B2B creative.
Wendy Walker: "LinkedIn is significant for B2B organisations. When you get your employees active on the platform, that is a powerful organic force. There's also a huge and growing percentage of GPT-type search that is pulling from LinkedIn. So in B2B, it is critical to have a strong presence, not only as a brand, but through your employees and influencers."
Pooja Dhanothia: "The network effect is the key mechanism here. It's not just influencers in the traditional sense; it's employees too. Companies that activate their employee networks are seeing three to four times more organic leads. If you're not tapping into that, you are leaving significant conversion on the table."
Jon Stona: "When you think about the shift from zero-click search to LLM discovery, you are looking at a fundamental transition: from traffic to visibility. That is the critical SEO and marketing strategy shift of this moment. The old model was: influencer equals brand awareness. The new model is: influencer equals visibility, and this equals growth."
Stop Telling Asia’s Stories. Start Building Culture Systems.
Zoe Chen, Strategy Director, Virtue Asia
Chloe Fair, Head of account management, Virtue Asia
In this session, Virtue, the culture consultancy born from Vice, urged marketers not to treat culture as simply something to inform their campaigns, but to use it to fuel engagement and brand development
“Culture is not a campaign tactic. It’s an operating system for growth,” they said, citing how Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t simply a performance that was consumed, but a cultural building block from which to be reinterpreted by fans.
“Asia doesn’t need better storytelling. It needs better participation models,” they said.
Introducing a “cultural operating system”, Chen and Fair urged brands to develop their cultural OS with key elements built around mission, characters and new worlds.
A guiding mission allows brands to have creative freedom without fragmenting their messaging. Johnnie Walker’s ‘Keep Walking’ activations, for example, reignited social spaces post-Covid in different locales but with a unified vision.
Memorable characters, like Google’s AuntyM influencer campaign, allowed for deepening engagement over time instead of a campaign spike and fall.
By creating community worlds, meanwhile, spaces are created for participation and engagement. Then, within these engaged spaces, reach through the community is extended through ‘returning moments of attention where product drops feel like chapters and products feel like cultural artefacts, much like Coke has done through its many ‘universes’.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
