Thomas Macphail: What happens in Vegas gets written up into a blog post in Vegas
Thomas Macphail, Senior Art Director at Howatson+Company ~ current CB Australian Agency of the Year ~ represented Australia at the 2025 Creative LIAisons program in Las Vegas, featuring some of the world’s most respected creative directors as speakers. In this exclusive for Campaign Brief, Macphail recaps an epic five days of masterclasses, workshops, jury sessions – and a few classic Las Vegas adventures along the way.
It’s hard not to avoid clichés about Las Vegas — everything is neon-lit, flashy, and non-stop. I’ve lost some money, forgotten to tip and gotten drunk on the strip, so a bit of a cliche of an Australian in Vegas.
Ok, Day 1: A blur of “where am I, what time is it, FFS I’ve left my charger at home and which seminar room am I supposed to be in?” The day was BIG: back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back panels and presentations, with introductions filled with achievements and titles that lasted almost as long as the talks themselves. My personal highlight, in classic art-director fashion, was Craft is Now Critical with Juan Woodbury, Dan Lucey, Michael Ritchie and Umma Saini. “Craft is the membrane between brand and audience.” I like that. I also loved hearing Andrea Diquez and Suzanne Powers — Creativity’s secret weapon. The thing that’s stuck with me most: Find your people. And hey, that night I did over some burgers.
Day 2: Straight back into it — workshop time, and it was a doozy. We were handed a real brief for an Aussie client, Westfield, and tasked with creating a “phygital” activation for their Disney releases. The LIAisons program split us into teams of ten, ran us through the “crazy 8” ideation technique, and then let us loose. By 2pm every table had landed on a lead idea, and by 4:30 we were presenting them to the entire room. It wasn’t exactly stress-free — ten people with no creative director to rein us in — but somehow we pulled it off: a full ten-page deck in just two hours. The standard across all thirteen presentations was insane. Time for one thousand beers after that.
Day 3: JURY day. Finally getting to sit in a jury and see how the sausage gets judged. I was in the TV & Online jury, chaired by Dan Lucey. The room was full of people from wildly different backgrounds, and it was clear from the jump there wasn’t going to be consensus. Across the entire day, no single piece — apart from one of the Grand Prix winners — got the same reaction from everyone. The two that split the room the most were Ikea “Made For Life” and Hornbach “No Project Without Drama”. The jury wasn’t dedicated to craft, but it became obvious that without craft, work simply didn’t stand a chance. Craft is the membrane between brand and audience — and here, the audience was a room full of extremely successful advertising people.
After that? Beach party time USA ✨🤘🏖 🦅
Day What Day is it: More talks with Liaisons slinking in throughout the day nursing sore heads from last night. As our host Chris Smith put it standing with a gaggle of the Aussie Liaisons: you’ve gotta back it up, that’s all part of it. So, straight back into talks. One of the standouts was Matt Watson, Chief Creative Officer at Sips & Bites. Matt projected kindness and fun, and chatting with other Liaisons afterwards, everyone seemed to value his perspective. We’re making ads — the work should be fun, funny, and unpretentious. To prove it, he showed screenshots of his WhatsApp chats where he simply sends raw ideas — no mockups, no polish — straight to decision makers. That kind of constant, honest back-and-forth has led to genuinely culture-changing work. My personal fave was the “The Wavy Cut“. Also, turns out I’d had my laptop charger with me all along.
Day 5: Strangely, there hasn’t been all that much chat about AI this week — maybe we’re all collectively over the novelty? When it did come up, the take was refreshingly blunt: it’s just another tool. As Daniela Varela, Group CD at Weber Shandwick New York, put it, “it lets us fuck it up faster.”
Speaking of fuck ups, the next speaker was Alexandra Taylor’s talk Horror stories & industry fuck ups. She opened her talk by telling everyone to put down their damn phones and closed it by hurling poker chips into the crowd. Pure Vegas stuff. Her talk was super inspiring, and her perspective was this: horror stories are a sign you’re onto something new. I’ll try to remember that next time.
Ok, that’s me. Enough blogging, back to Vegas-ing.