Adfest 2023 Diary: Laura Geagea, Regional Managing Director, Sweetshop China, Asia MENA

Laura Geagea, Regional Managing Director, Sweetshop China, Asia MENA shares her Adfest 2023 diary. Here I am, a short week after this year’s awesome Adfest festival, finally having caught up on all the lost sleep (and piled up emails!) from this year’s Adfest week. And what a week it was.

Back after 3 years of online chats, zoom, teams and skype meetings for all of us, Adfest came back with a big bang and with a strong RISE theme. Rise from Covid, Rise with our creativity, Rise from all the strangeness of the three years that we can leave behind (hopefully at least…) and Rise all the way to Pattaya for a few full packed days of sun and talks and cocktails and awards!

I was incredibly lucky this year to be invited as the Jury President of the Film Craft Lotus & New Director Lotus and that just made things even more exciting for me with our return to Adfest.

I like to think that the only time we all get to just watch a lot of work, and just do that and nothing else, is when we are judging. And I savor these moments like no other.

The 63 jury members all arrived between Sunday and Monday of last week to Pattaya and after checking in and getting settled we kicked off Monday night with a welcome dinner / drinks at the beautiful Royal Cliff terrace overlooking the sea. A nice reminder of what we had been missing, before we prepared to dive into the work the next morning.

Tuesday morning, bright and excited we all gathered in the jury briefing room and after a quick intro by the Adfest team we were all sent to our jury rooms with our teams to get the ball rolling.

My jury was a great mix of personalities, sensibilities, seriousness & silly humor. And that’s exactly what we needed for the work we were watching.

By the end of Wednesday all our medals in our 2 categories were awarded.

These are the days I get a small reminder of why our industry is so special and why we all enjoy it so much. Once you forget the deadlines, the shrinking budgets and the strict supplier lists, you just remember why we tell the stories the way we do, why we strive for the craft and the unique work we can create. And that makes everything worth it.

We had around 200+ entries in the Film Craft category. One of the largest categories going off the 1600+ entries across all categories of the festival.

It was really nice to see a strong comeback in the quality of the work. Covid had obviously made things tricky for us as an industry. Creatively & practically for production our output was strained. But we are back, and our creative bar has risen.

The Thai hilarious black humor, the Chinese long lost stories set in rural China villages, the Japanese fashion sense & unique eye, the Indian daring creativity with locally rooted but also brave ideas and so much more from all the other countries around… We had it all.

For Film Craft we ended up awarding 2 Gold Lotuses, 1 in the directing sub-category and 1 in the production design sub-category.

Be sure to watch these two films. 

We had a lot of laughs with the “Love your Gut” for Dutchie Yogurt.

Beautifully crafted piece, funny, dark, absurd and strong at the same time. This is from Ogilvy Thailand.

And also “You don’t need wings to fly” by Pocari Sweat. Dentsu Tokyo is behind this one. We awarded this one in Production Design, most of everything you see in the spot is in camera and works so well enhancing the story and making it stronger.

We also judged the New Director Lotus category and we awarded 1 Silver to this beautiful film by W Shanghai for Nio, “The Road” in the short film sub category.

The young director did a really nice job holding the craft from start to end and keeping the story going for 10minutes, while spanning across 20-30 years of the main character’s story going back to his hometown in rural China every few years for Chinese New Year to see his grandparents.

I also had the pleasure of judging the Innova Lotus, Lotus Roots & Grande for Humanity with the other 7 Jury presidents of this year, led by our Grand Jury President Ali Rez. This was a very different selection of work than the ones we saw in Film Craft & New Director Lotus and that made it all the more interesting. As expected, the range of work was wide and touched all topics from global warming, to women’s rights, to politics, to health.

For the Innova Lotus, all teams that had their projects shortlisted had to come up on the breakout stage on Thursday and present their idea to us. Some super innovative ideas, thought provoking and bold.

The Lotus Roots is a category that I personally think is very powerful. This is an award that Adfest created very uniquely and specifically to celebrate culture and local values. We all know the strength the truth has when we tell our stories. When you anchor that truth with your roots and a region, country, city’s background then there’s no telling how strong the piece can be.

The Grande in this category was awarded to Impact BBDO Dubai for their campaign for Annahar Newspaper.

And finally the Grande for Humanity. This one speaks for itself: Knock Knock from Cheil Worldwide, Seoul.

Now, after all the winners, a bit more about the festival!

The rest of the 800+ delegates started trickling in Wednesday night and Thursday morning and by Thursday lunch time you could feel the PEACH building buzzing with energy and excitement. Probably also from those yummy coffees that they were serving at the coffee bar at the top of the stairs…

Adfest put together an extensive schedule on both the stages and breakaway rooms. There were 60+ speakers across it all, getting on stage for debates, presentations, workshops.

I didn’t have as much time as usual to spend in the big presentation rooms unfortunately but I popped in an out of a few to get an idea of the trends and the main thoughts: a lot of it went towards the Metaverse, Web 3 and the world of robots which always scares me a little bit but then also, of course, some came back to creativity, craft and the importance of telling our stories, telling them well and carrying them creatively. Call me old school but I will never tire of hearing different views on how to elevate craft and tell our stories in a more powerful way.

Thursday afternoon, Campaign Brief Asia, Sweetshop, Fin Design + Effects & Voodoo hack all had our usual Legendary party overlooking the sea! Always nice to see familiar faces and also new faces! I also had a few of my Sweetshop team join us in Pattaya for the event which was really nice. Our director / Founding Partner Melanie Bridge took some of beautiful shots that you’ll see on this page!

And last but not least the awards show, spanning over a two night ceremony at Peach.

Each jury president went on stage to present the Silvers, Golds and Grandes of their category and say a few words about the work entered.

The second night of the ceremony ended with the late very respected Mr. Jimmy Lam being added to the Adfest hall of fame. A big honor for the man who led the festival for all of us for so many years. After that, the special awards that concluded the ceremony.

All the delegates, some with their Lotuses in hand, moved over to the Afterparty and Panorama bar of the Royal Cliff.

And by Sunday morning the friendly staff of the Royal Cliff were wishing us well “See you next year!” while we were getting in our rides back to Bangkok.

Adfest is always a bit of a whirlwind, but one of the very good kind. And even more so this year after a few years away for all of us and for me having the pleasure of being asked to join the jury.

Thank you Adfest for giving us all the platform to celebrate all this great work as well as have an intense few days filled with so much entertainment and fun.

It’s very clear to see how much richness we have in our Asian Pacific region, in the work, the culture, the people and most importantly the stories. It’s safe to say, we are still going strong.

See you next year everyone!