“Communications and design have been disrupted but there will be more challenges: the business models of your clients are the same of 20 years ago”

“Marketing budgets will soon disappear and merge with distribution, sales… a new department will be created called customer experience”

“This Festival is about explaining that change, how to check your business and your agency to adapt to these changes”

“Creativity is a messy project, it’s chaotic, it’s a tiny magical little thing we can’t predict”

“Whenever you talk about transformation and the future people think automatically about technology but it doesn’t have to be necessarily about that”

“Things are changing fast: we have distributed workforces today, collaborative thinking, In-house clients, hybrid talents, data inspiration…”

“I identify four super powers today: Curiosity, Collaboration, Diversity and Experimentation”

“Repeatable methods produce predictable outputs. Predictability kills the value of creativity. Creativity doesn’t come out of a linear, logical IfThisThenThat process, it’s like writing a poem, writing a song, there is no unique process”

“Logic doesn’t usually work in creativity. Chaos, the unpredicted, works best, it creates a WTF moment”

“For many marketers the consumer is a theoretical, abstract entity that doesn’t exist”

“Stop expecting data to do all the work for you: Data seems reasonable, but not necessarily”

“How do we find balance? The answer is nurturing culture. Share values. Let individual voices to flourish through collaboration. Culture is the stuff the company needs to run in the XXI century. If you have process but dont have culture you are screwed.”

“Agencies are normally organised top down traditionally, like clients. Forsman & Bodenfors is structured more like a blob”

“The collective is our creative director, if we fail, we fail together. The only boss is the task itself. More brains are better than one.”

“Strategy and creative is one process, it happens at the same time. All roles are involved in all tasks as a team, each bringing in their specially to the process”

“Where I am from, El Paso, 90% of us are hispanos but we never question our American identity”

“My colleagues Jorgen (Norwegian) and KC (Malaysian) are writers that bring not only great talent but also open up the perspective of our office so much”

“Creativity needs diversity. Diversity opens much more the perspective of a team”

Good news for creators: “Creativity is one of the last things we are gonna be able to automate”

“Creativity is as important as literacy. We need to bring back the Arts in education: STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, ARTS and Maths) not just STEM”

“Embrace your difference. Be more human. Tech for tech’s sake is ridiculous”

“Happy people are harder to kill, they have so much to loose”

“When I was diagnosed a brain cancer I started my project #SecretClub to boost my immune system with happiness through creativity, my best tool”

“Be mindful of your baggage, your concerns, and deal with them before they have an impact on your health. Creativity can be a great tool to do so”

“My job as a creative coach consists in bringing people together, inspiring them, and guide them on their journey, whatever that journey is”

“Personal/professional development should be a must on our day to day. We should train our creative directors to be creative coaches and make the most out of our different ways of working”

“Not everyone works the same. At Dropbox everyone knows their enneagram and before any meeting they check each others’ to understand how they work and make the most out of them”

“In your designated eco spheres of fear and influence you will begin the process of harvesting brands and building and leveraging your reach and weaving your own personal brand tapestries”

“Three decades of a life with magic has given me great insights to harness when coaching other people. I gained an incredible understanding of magic as a learning tool. It works amazingly well to break down barriers between people and to help individuals find their voice”.

“Deal with your baggage: look into your past. If you are carrying a negative baggage, face it, act now. Get rid of anything that has a negative impact on you. The longer you carry this thing, the weaker you’ll become”

“The more you do the things that you love and that feel true to yourself, the more strong your immune system will be”

“Unpredictable ideas are born when we push the creative thinking to the next level”

“Some key concepts to understand blockchain are: Immutability, traceability and transparency. Everything that is written into the system can’t be altered. Programmability: you can set conditions. Tokenization: transfer of ‘something of value’”

“When we put things together, take them apart, then put them together again in different ways, we are not only creating, but also evaluating, reflecting and re-creating to achieve new possibilities”

“More and more designers become curators, applying their design style and rules to automated frameworks and systems.
The focus of design work shifts from actual output to the process itself. Designers set the rules, machines follow.”

“The Passing is the best thing I’ve ever written and I’m very proud of it as a performance. The idea of writing something as good or even better pretty much paralysed me for eight weeks. I struggled as many creatives, creators, writers and artists before me have struggled. But with time I have come to realise that most of the time it just takes a tiny trigger to kick it all off.”

“Your body’s job is to keep you alive! Your body has intrinsic wisdom and knows how to heal itself. That’s why listening to your body makes sense”

“The essential balance of activity and non-activity is as simple as needing to exhale after inhaling”

“Our 2nd Creative Incubator aims to foster the use of creativity to design solutions for real world problems and not only for communicating messages. It will have a purpose and a social cause”

“The creative agencies of the future will have to use collaborative systems, be agile, specific, global, experiential, interactive, with both product and service oriented models and with non geographic dependencies”

 

We are certain that European young talent is our future and we are committed to promote it. Check the work of all the young creatives that HP Albrecht curated for their high potential.

Abby & Alice, Sebastião de la Guardia, Ana Paiva, Juan Hernández Leal, Katie Kidd, Gerard Arderius, Gabriella Mussurakis, Pablo Criado, Natàlia Pàmies, Obinna Udekwereze, Ally Macrae, Alejandro Melo, Elín Elísabet Einarsdóttir, Susana Binder, Dimitry Levdanski, Maria Ines Silva, Marta Rosillo, Julia Wiesbeck, Sofia Pusa, Carolina Caldeira, Melina Johnsen, Kristine Ivanova.

These High Potentials presented alongside Creative Directors from the following agencies 72andSunny, LOLA MullenLowe, Ogilvy, Spark 44, hasan & partners, The Wunderwaffe and Patrizia Boglione. These professionals later gave them their feedback in a speed dating session where some productive connections were made.

A Festival is not a festival without a proper closing party, and so, we couldn’t end it differently. What we did differently was the location, leaving behind the Disseny Hub Barcelona and venturing into the hidden gems of the city to celebrate the magic of creativity in an even more inspiring setting, as its name suggests: Utopia 126.

A factory turned into creative studios and filming sets by two veteran film and advertising producers, the space featured a screening room to visualise all the nominated pieces and a quirky photo booth which became the delight of the night, together with the amazing food and cocktails that preceded the Grand Prix Winner announcement: Jung Von Matt’s “BVG x Adidas – The Ticket Shoe”