McCANN Singapore’s Seth Low looks back to find a way forward at Creative LIAisons
Seth Low (pictured left), Senior Creative at McCANN Singapore, was one of the near 130 talented young creatives, selected from around the globe, to attend the LIA Creative LIAisons training program that runs concurrently with the LIA judging week at the Encore Hotel in Las Vegas. Here Low wraps up his learnings from the week.
September 25, 2026. 18:40. Singapore.
I stepped onto my flight with one too many thoughts.
A few months earlier, an On The Spot win had earned me a place at Creative LIAisons, where I would represent McCann Singapore alongside 125 young creatives from around the world. I was excited, but also thoroughly overthinking the upcoming week. I said a silent prayer for a smooth flight, and hoped sleep would do the rest.
September 25, 2026. 18:33. Los Angeles.
I hopped off the plane at LAX (sorry, I had to) seven minutes before I had left Singapore. And just like that, I travelled back in time. Which was cool, but also strangely appropriate.
Here’s why. As young creatives, so much of our attention is fixed on what comes next. The next platform. The latest technology. The next big thing that supposedly changes everything.
The future starts to feel less like somewhere we are going and more like something we are constantly trying to catch up with. So there was something comforting about spending a week at Creative LIAisons doing almost the opposite.
Looking back.
During her LIA Legend acceptance speech, Susan Credle took us back to BBDO New York in the 1980s, where Phil Dusenberry encouraged a young Susan to get out of the office, experience the world and make something that had not been made before. It was a useful reminder: that looking back at great work matters. But so does looking up from it.
Alexandra Taylor took us to December 2012 and a campaign that, by her telling, had almost every reason to fail: barely any budget, a photographer pulling out, problem after problem. What survived was the belief in the idea and the determination to make it properly.
It went on to win a Yellow Pencil.
For all the talk about transformation, so many of the lessons that resurfaced felt familiar and almost timeless. Having a point of view. Caring about craft. Know why an idea is good. Being curious about things outside advertising. Being someone people want in the room.
The industry might keep changing, but the things they make a good creative seems to have endured.
And perhaps that was why Kaleeta McDade’s Steer Into The Crash felt like such an apt way to end the week. Her history lesson reframed much of the anxiety around where the industry is heading: change is not exactly new to advertising.
And so I turned to the 125 other delegates in the room.
Each of us came from different markets, agencies and backgrounds. Yet after enough conversations, meals and, inevitably, drinks, the same questions kept surfacing.
Nobody really had the answers. And that was strangely reassuring. Because if the talks at LIAisons taught me anything, it is that careers which look perfectly assembled in hindsight rarely feel that way while you are living them.
You learn from the people ahead of you, certainly. But you learn from the people beside you too. And what I saw in that room was not certainty. It was curiosity. Ambition. Generosity. A willingness to keep pushing even when nobody quite knows what comes next.
At the end of events like these, someone usually says that the industry is in good hands. It means so much more when you get to experience those hands firsthand.
In a moment, I will get on another plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, I will close my eyes again. This time, I will travel forward.
I still do not know exactly what kind of industry I will land in. But after this week, I feel much better about who I will be landing there with.
Check out more 2026 LIAisons reflections below:
Malik Bernardo, Associate Creative Director at Dentsu Creative Philippines.
Soham Ghosh, Creative Director at Ogilvy Gurgaon.