AWARD’s This Way Up Creative Festival was held at The Ovolo Hotel Sydney from August 16-18.
Robbie Brammall, MONA’s Director of Marketing and Communications, kicked off the speaker events with a highly entertaining keynote by showing us the Mona Bona, explaining the asymmetric upside of risk and David Walsh’s dreaded fear that marketing would ultimately result in MONA drifting toward the middle. Just as we regathered our senses James McGrath, interviewed by Lilian Sor, postulated that ‘worry was actually optimism at work’. It was a predictably thought-provoking chat that also addressed risk, or lack thereof, by claiming that we are so concerned we don’t get things wrong, we’ve forgotten how to get things right.
And so, This Way Up speaker events kicked off brilliantly. Over the next few days a packed audience of over 200 people also heard from:
- An expertly chaired CMO panel from mi3’s Paul McIntyre
- The hugely popular Aunties with raucous cheerleaders in the audience
- Karen Maurice-O’Leary and Jay Morgan from Meta, demystifying the metaverse
- Mundanara Bayles, Co-Founder of BlackCard, with a highly eloquent and emotive address on leadership songlines
- Dave Bowman from Google, moderated a fascinating AWARD Work Behind the Work session including Suncorp’s ‘One House for Many’ and VW’s ‘GTI Hijack’ campaigns
- Neil Heymann, Global CCO of Accenture Song, closed the speaker events with an insightful and entertaining international keynote. We learned many things – his daughter Ruby hates ads and five very annoying questions that help create better work.
This Way Up also included sold-out educational opportunities:
Mundanara Bayles hosted two exceptional Cultural Capability training workshops.
The AWARD Craft workshop curated and chaired by Jonathan Kneebone, The Glue Society took 25 midweight creatives through pitching processes and tasks undertaken in the day-to-day, and simplified them.
Over the two days delegates were mentored by Ant Melder, Cocogun, Julian Schreiber, Special Group Australia and Barb Humphries The Monkeys Sydney and walked away with tangible frameworks and exercises, reaching unexpected conclusions fast. Register your interest for 2023 here.
The AWARD and CPC ‘Great Work needs a Great Producer’ was a sold-out workshop, whereby junior producers got to hear from hosts Martin Box (EP, Airbag and CPC Co-Chair) and Karen Bryson (EP, Collider) about some invaluable industry tips and tricks to make shoots more efficient and effective.
Delegates then broke into groups to breakdown scripts into a production schedule, with the help of experienced EP’s from other CPC member agencies in attendance. For more information about this and other CPC courses, register your interest for 2023 here.