Spikes Asia Festival opens, revealing 2019 Festival Theme: Asia Rising

New Creative eCommerce Award announced

17 April 2019 – Spikes Asia, the Festival dedicated to creativity in the Asia Pacific region, is now open for delegate registration and entries for 2019. This year’s overarching content theme ‘Asia Rising’ reflects and celebrates the growth of the fast-evolving creative communications industry in the region.

The Creative eCommerce Spike has been introduced for 2019. The award honours creative, commercial ecommerce, payment solutions and innovation, and acknowledges Asia Pacific as a global leader in this space. The Spikes are Asia Pacific’s highest accolade for creative excellence and branded communications, and celebrate the breadth of creative disciplines across the region.

Joe Pullos, Festival Director of Spikes Asia, said, “Spikes Asia celebrates the very best creativity from across Asia Pacific, through the Awards and on the stages, with the exciting addition of the Creative eCommerce Spike. We are a Festival in Asia, for Asia. This year’s programme will feature more regional speakers and will better reflect the creative challenges and opportunities for the creative community in APAC”

Entries into the new Creative eCommerce Spike will need to demonstrate how the innovation and optimisation of the customer journey led to increased consumer engagement and commercial success. To reflect changes in the industry and market trends, many of the 22 Spikes Awards categories have been refreshed and some new categories introduced including:

• ‘Challenges & Breakthroughs’ section across five Spikes – celebrating work with a specific focus on local campaigns and cultural insights as well as challenger brands and breakthroughs on a budget.
• ‘Sports & eSports’ section added to the Entertainment Spikes to recognise creativity that taps into fan culture and leverages the power of sports and eSports in connecting people to brands.
• ‘New Realities & Voice Activation’ category added to four Spikes to group all VR and new realities work together.
• Creative Effectiveness includes two new categories: 'Collaborative Creative Effectiveness', which celebrates collaborative efforts that drive tangible business results and cultural change, and 'Multi-market Creative Effectiveness' which recognises the measurable impact of creative work implemented across different markets.

Entries are now being accepted for both Spikes Asia and the Tangrams Effectiveness Awards. These have been aligned to provide an integrated experience for entrants and Festival attendees with the final deadline for entries into the Tangrams on 2 August and Spikes Asia 16 August 2019.

The Festival is where the APAC creative community comes together to explore creativity in all its forms and learn from industry experts from across the region, with sessions on the main stage translated live into Mandarin, Korean and Japanese.

Speakers at this year’s Festival will deconstruct the region’s creative ecosystem and will share compelling stories of creative bravery and innovation. The content programme will continue to revolve around the five key content tracks of Communication, Effectiveness, Innovation, Experience and Reach and the programme themes have been shaped to directly address the challenges faced by the creative industry in APAC and provide them with inspiration and new connections to embrace opportunities locally and internationally.