AWARD

A Festival of Commercial Creativity thrives on the discourse between speakers and attendees.

"Going through your Instagrams is the new way of note taking." There I've said it. Or better: I've borrowed this thought from a tweet that was sent during Circus. Which nicely illustrates my point: What good is a creative festival if you aren't in discourse with the other attendees? Luckily, Circus delivers that in spades. And interactivity is not confined to the electronic space.

As Anthony Freedman encouraged us to 'step outside the industry for a while', Craig Davis went further and had us all take off our shoes and stand up to get a true sense of grounding. Master of Ceremony Joe Talcott made us search for post it notes, detect the hoaxes within the speakers' CVs and kept our minds open for the next big thought. Like The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. Or Facebook's Speed to Create and China's Speed to Market. Brands' Open APIs and Shops as Open Theatres. Or Coca-Cola's Liquid and Linked Ideas.

Jonathan Mildenhall's guided tour through Coca-Cola's Content 2020 strategy was indeed a big opener of Day One, expertly delivered by voice and illustrated by hand. And apart from the strong belief in a new, dynamic way of storytelling that permeates Jonathan's work, his keynote taught me the wonderful word of 'womanity'. I am not 100% sure about its semantic difference to 'womanhood'. But Jon used it to describe Madonna's 'fierce, independent womanity'. And if there is one woman that deserves a new gender expression it's Madonna.

Speaking of semantics, Joe Talcott rounded up the day nicely with a plea to reconsider one of the most popular hashtags: #Fail and its grandiose cousin #EpicFail. Maybe next time replace it with #thanksforthelesson, or #don'tgiveup or #learn. Now there's a thought to borrow.

Day Two's program ca be found on the Circus website.