Ty Montague, chief creative officer and co-president of JWT North America, Fernando Vega Olmos, creative chairman at JWT Latin America and Continental Europe, and Tay Guan Hin, regional ECD at JWT Southeast Asia, all agreed that Asia has always been prominent in terms of creative output on the world stage.
On Asia versus the rest of the world, Montague notes that Asia and Latin America are the two regions that tend to lead in terms of agency size and creativity. “The results speak for themselves,” he says.
Olmos praised Asia’s “natural tendency” for good work in new channels while Tay notes that agencies in this region tend to strive for success due to the innate hunger and passion within companies.
On the year ahead, Montague says that digital would again be at the fore of every creative agency. “The idea of a completely standalone digital agency, is a thing of the past,” he says.
“The coming together of standalone digital companies and more traditional story-telling companies is only going to accelerate,” adds Montague.
Tay agrees and says agencies will still be gunning for integration but “it’s easier said than done” while Olmos says that creative agencies have to “create ideas that people want to spend time with” and goes on to suggest how that can be done.
In terms of markets to look out for in 2010, all three creative heads agree that although China and India would likely emerge as the dominant creative powerhouses, globalisation and the coming together of more diverse world views as well as “crowd-sourcing” would be the best sources of creativity and ideas.
To find out more about Media’s 2009 Creative Rankings, click here.
