DDB NZ creative duo James O’Sullivan and Adam Barnes return from AdFest’s Young Lotus comp

CB Exclusive: DDB NZ creative duo, James O’Sullivan (near left) and Adam Barnes (far left), have recently returned from Thailand where they attended AdFest and were the only NZ representatives to compete in Young Lotus, where they placed as finalists.

O’Sullivan and Barnes were given a brief and just 24 hours to come up with an idea for an industry-wide problem. They share their experience and insights on the brief exclusively with CB.

This year’s Young Lotus workshop was themed #LiveMoreForBetterIdeas, a conversation starter around overworked creatives, in particular a girl at Y&R Indonesia who died of a heart attack after working for over 30 hours straight. It’s hard to imagine that happening here in NZ. We’re pretty lucky to get ‘Sandy’s Summer Hours’ at DDB so we can knock off early on Fridays and go surfing, but some of the Asian teams we spoke to were working 12 hour days, 6 days a week.

Work/life balance is becoming an increasing issue for the industry. Creatives are spending their lives working, because we’ve told ourselves that’s what we have to do to be successful. But in fact, if we want to have better ideas we should work less and live more. Being inspired is so important for us, as it’s inspiration that fuels our creativity, and the best source of inspiration comes from just living your life.

While we thought about how ironic it was to work all night on a brief for over-worked creatives, we listened to BBDO’s top creative director’s share their insights on the brief before each team presented their idea to a panel of judges from around Asia/Pacific. 

Our idea was for agencies to give their creatives a Live Better Bonus that could only be spent on experiences that would broaden our minds and help us to have better ideas. Other ideas ranged from sunlight activated briefs to rechargeable swipe tags, to the more bizarre farting office chair.

After the challenge was over we had some time up our sleeves to put the brief to the test, while the judges selected four finalists. Our idea was chosen along with teams from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Seoul to present to over 1,000 Adfest delegates on Saturday. The winning idea came from the Taiwan team, who built a management app. for creative directors, that was well executed, creative and business minded.

Besides never to eat deep fried scorpion, the trip has taught us to evaluate our own work/life balance. We’ve realised the importance of working productively over working hard and it’s reminded us to keep having a life outside the office.

On that note, we’re off to the pub for some inspiration.