Matthew Chen’s Final Creative LIAisons Diary: Wisdom, goodbyes and one last photo dump

Art Director Matthew Chen represented Australia at the 2025 Creative LIAisons program in Las Vegas, featuring some of the world’s most respected creative directors as speakers. Here, Chen reports exclusively for Campaign Brief.

How long does it take to make a friend? According to a study by psychologist Jeffrey Hall around 50 hours for a casual friendship and 90 into real friends. This past week however makes me believe it can happy in the span of a one hour lunch at The Encore. Or the time to drink a tallboy beer walking to In-N-Out. Or to lose a few hands of blackjack.

Day 5. The final day of big seminars, presented by big names. “2025 Life Trends” by Thomas Mueller had the familiar topic of the week of human connection between audiences and brands. Alexandra Taylor reassured us that horror stories are an indication you’re making something new, while Susan Credle reminded us we have the creativity to make ads that people actually enjoy. R. John Fiedelino taught how to dissect our ideas from the client and audience side and panels spoke about “Creativity in PR”, closing with more answers from CCOs to the questions we’ve been too scared to ask. Plenty of wisdom nuggets being dropped but you couldn’t help but feel the sense of a tinge of sadness in the air. The dread knowing goodbyes were soon to be said. Time to make the most of every hour left. Every. Hour.

Now having had the weekend to recover, I sit and write processing the week that was. Feeling grateful to LIA for creating such an amazing program for creatives and ungrateful that Australia is so far away from so many new friends. To any new friends that happen to stumble across this, I can’t wait to catch up over a Melbourne Magic.

Thanks for reading along and in true gen z style, a photo dump to mark the end of a fabulous experience.