Had a great day out last weekend visiting the Songzhuang Art festival. The entire village was packed with artists and art spectators, and almost no white person there! In contrary to 798. Our friend Damao produced this cool set of lucky clouds made of plastic cups, took her 5 days to staple
She then also took us to this exclusive exhibition opening featuring some of China’s best know artists.
Right at Yugong Yishan’s 5th birthday party we had the chance to see about 400 tanks cruising past right outside the club’s door. They were just coming back from their 60th year anniversary dress rehearsal when the lights turned red and they backed up for a few kilometers.
But of course the party went on
Woo, long day. First day. Digital, Promo and Direct jury. All guys, all nice. Saw 150 pieces of work today, half in Direct and Promo, the rest was digital work. Direct and Promo is a much better category in my opinion as you actually get to walk around the room to see the work. Digital judging confines you in front of a screen and time passes infinitely slower.
The keywords for today were “Loading …” and “Average time spent on this website was 11,43 minutes”. I am not sure how valuable this measurement criteria has become over the past year, every second digital entry stated the consumer’s time on the website as main success factor. Given that most of the sites were mostly “loading …” it seems to be mostly irrelevant.
Overall the work was good. I was impressed by a few Indian campaigns that made it into the second round, and also the Indian section at the lunch buffet was great.
SQ803 from Beijing to Singapore, seat 51G. No sign of Economic Crisis here, the plane is packed with Chinese couples, probably all on a shopping trip. No-one looks like a creative or media type. I haven’t checked the other juries, but on the Direct, Promotion and Digital Jury I seem to be the only one representing China …
Going through the first round online judging of the Digital category it seemed like a lot of entries were from the mainland. Lets see how many of these are left when we are presented with the shortlist tomorrow. There was certainly some great work out there. The Japanese as always have entered a lot of outstanding campaigns with highly innovative use of technology. But also Malaysia, India and the Philippines have left me with one or two campaigns to remember.
Its going to be an interesting judging over the next three days. To start with I don’t know any of my fellow judges. That’s rather unusual at an Asian creative award show where you tend to bump into the same faces at different shows. Not so unusual especially for a digital category is the fact that there is no girl on the jury … three days of digital, promo and design judging with nine blokes … I reckon we will all know each other very well by the end of the week.
