Marcus Tesoriero: Judging in the tropics

Marcus Tesoriero is creative director at tech-driven CX, creative and media agency Affinity, Sydney and he is a juror for Interactive and Mobile at AdFest in Pattaya, Thailand. He writes exclusively for Campaign Brief.

It’s been a good decade since I last visited Thailand, but I get the feeling this expedition isn’t going to be like my visits of the past. Wild, hedonistic full moon parties fuelled by jungle juice on the beach have now been replaced with strong coffee and satay sticks in a hotel convention room, followed by a few quiet drinks at the bar before bedtime. But hey, I can think of rougher work trips.

A few months ago, I was invited by AdFest – one of Asia Pacific’s largest festivals of advertising creativity – to join the jury for their interactive and mobile categories. It’s a great honour to judge the best of what our region has to offer, and with a trip to Thailand thrown in as part of the package, my response (naturally) was “yeah baby, let’s do this”. Before you make judgement it’s not the complete junket you may think it is (I can hear my CEO calling bullshit as I type).

The process began a few weeks ago with an online voting phase to narrow down the entries. Between my interactive and mobile categories to assess, there were 31 sub-categories with anywhere up to 40 entries to judge per sub-category. Now, I’ll leave the number-crunching to you, but I estimated that there were well over 400 entries to judge – each with idea boards to read and case study videos to absorb. And by the end of that process alone, my junket to Thailand seemed adequately well-deserved.  

I am, however, happy to say that some of the work I’ve seen to date is unquestionably world-class. It was great to see our region stepping up to the podium in many international awards shows within the interactive and mobile categories last year – and I’m sure the trend will continue in 2016.

I was really impressed by the conversations and opinions offered by my fellow jurors to decide what work made the cut. Within the group I was fortunate to be accompanied by creative directors from some of Asia’s most respected agencies such as TBWA/Hakuhodo Tokyo, Razorfish Mumbai and BBDO Bangkok. As icing on top, our jury president was the supremely intelligent Valerie Cheng – who now heads up the Facebook-owned Creative Shop in Singapore.

As a background into my initial online rounds of judging, I developed my own criteria of questions to evaluate our mass of submissions – the sentiment of which I shared with the wider interactive and mobile jury team to help determine our winners over the last few days. They were:

1. Does the idea feel like its part of a wider brand strategy, or does it feel like a one-off gimmick?

2. Does the idea link to a human insight that the target audience would relate to and engage with?

3. Is the idea truly innovative, inherently shareable or is it an insightfully useful tool in people’s lives?

4. What was the idea’s goal to achieve and has it produced amazing results for this specific goal?

5. Is the idea unique to the specific category being judged, or brilliant for another category and the entrant is trying to squeeze an extra award out of it?

6. For mobile, has the idea enhanced or been enhanced by an ‘on the go’ experience – even if it’s a cracking digital idea, could it have only been done through mobile?

7. Think twice if I am blinded by the brand’s previous work, a big production budget or an amazingly crafted case study. Take all that away and judge at the idea at its core.

8. After all that, think honest and hard as to whether the idea feels new – even if it’s an amazing idea. Not only direct competitor brands but has a brand in another category executed the core idea in a completely different way?

Pleasingly, after all those intense filters, we were left with some ground-breaking work – but I’ll pump the brakes on talking about my favourites until I speak on stage later in the week at the Crossfire panel discussion.

In the meantime, I’m off to the pool for a sunset cocktail (and I’ll try to avoid the jungle juice.)