On Wednesday night, close to 200 people crammed into Pressure in New York City for 
the final Battle for the HeArt Creative Roadshow.
The venue was way cool...but the sound was....gee, how should I put it....hmmm...well....IT SUCKED! That and the torrential downpour which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lars Bastholm is in fact from another planet, or at least is able to channel the elements. Such is his mastery of all things creative!
Funnily enough...the sound was absolutely perfect in the restrooms for some reason. Many people came back to me afterwards maintaining that THAT was the reason they stayed so long in the restrooms. Yeah, right!
It's kind of ironic of course that in our business, where technology is part and parcel of everything that we do...that often times, it gets in our way and even becomes a distraction. Think about it....form and function. Pressure: great venue for a party, not so much for a conference...but a parference, well that's another story.
Before I get into the highlights from Lars' and Doug's speeches, I just want to take the opportunity again to thank our sponsors for making this whole Battle a reality. Without your generosity, commitment, support and belief in myself, the "Battle" brand and initiative, and most importantly the Creative Community, we would and no doubt will continue to wander through the creative abyss searching for inspiration and answers: About, DoubleClick's Motif, Klipmart, MarketWatch, MSN, Reuters and Unicast. Also a thank you to our media sponsors: Adweek, the Webby's and AAAA's.
P.S. Don't forget to enter MSN's Creative Awards!
So here are the takeaways from Lars and Doug:
Lars showed some great work - and it was interesting how much commonality there was between his and my presentations, with respect to the Honda Grrr commerical, Trailer Crashers etc.
I also found out that AKQA (whom I believe is one of the finest creative agencies in the space...bar very very few others) created the campaign for the Brazilian ISP (you had to be there :))
Lars spoke about moving from clickthrough to "online storytelling" and showed a great example, where literally an entire story is played out for the game, Fable.
His rallying cry was not that we need a new definition of creativity, but that we need a new definition of the (creative) toolbox, and left us with the Honda Grrr message - which couldn't be more applicable to the interactive arena: If you hate it, change it...and make it better!
Then Doug Jaeger took the stage and using Keynote, showed a 125 "slide" presention as a linear movie. Each slide took 10 seconds and all in all his presentation took 25 minutes. He basically laid it on the line as the presentation (showing illustrations on a chalkboard) drove itself...it was in auto pilot and therfore if Doug had finished his point, but there were another 8 seconds left on the slide...he had to wing it. All in all, great originality and spontaneous storytelling.
Doug reduced his performance to 6 main points:
1) Think inside the box - read the manual (stick to the fundamentals)
2) Refuse to specialize - this is an age of generalists and flexibility
3) Everything is new - the repeating triangle of Trend --> Fad --> History --> REPEAT. In other words, what's old is new again, however with one twist: the challenge is to created connected experiences
4) There are no ordinary moments - opportunistic marketing; the dawn of personal media
5) The first mistake is calling it work
6) Client's don't listen
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