What Competitions Like Young Spikes Offer to Young Creative Professionals

This year’s Spikes Asia competition will be held on 23-26 September at Suntec City in Singapore and on 28 August, Indonesia’s event partner, Femina Group, held Young Spikes Indonesia to encourage young creative professionals to participate in the regional competition. We spoke with Leo Burnett Group ECD Brian Capel about the competition and what it means for Indonesia’s creative industry.

Capel was one of the judges for the Integrated category and he feels that there is a lot of strength among the youth contingent of the country’s creative professionals, enough to propel Indonesia to become among the top countries in the creative industry.

The challenge for the contestants this year was how to tackle the issue of diabetes in Indonesia which has started to affect the youth population thanks to the increasing consumption of unhealthy food and lack of physical activities despite the popularity of cycling and running over the last few years.

One of the major factors in selecting the winners was whether the contestants challenged the brief enough to create something comprehensive and actionable. Additionally, the proposal had to be something that can be championed and defended by health professionals upon scrutiny by government health officials.

For Capel, it’s important that Indonesia keeps sending its young creative professionals to competitions such as Spikes and Cannes to broaden their horizons and learn from others in the industry on a global scale as they are more attuned to trends and immediate market progressions and will be the ones running the show in the not so distant future.

Competing against their peers from other countries is what gets the youth excited, Capel said, and it will give them the confidence they need to become more creative and produce increasingly improved work for themselves and their clients.

As to why Indonesia did not enter Young Spikes Digital, Capel found that each of the 53 submissions actually had a digital component in the delivery method. An important part of a campaign is being able to effectively communicate the message to the audience and because digital medium is part of the standard communications channel for the youth, it didn’t seem necessary.