Singapore creativity: Much ado about nothing

Singapore has rarely been seen as a world-beater on the advertising stage, and increasingly it finds the competition by its Asian neighbours increasing. Marcus Chhan runs the rule through the local industry to ascertain whether Singapore is lagging behind the rest of the world in creativity, and to find out what roles the issues of talent, culture, awards and clients play in the scenario.

Is Singapore a creative wasteland?  This question is, by nature of the type of industry, controversial and perhaps more confrontational than any other but to those outside the business that is marketing – it remains a purely yes or no question. To those behind the walls which make up the advertising and marketing profession, the question can simply never be answered so succinctly, and when a creative director or a marketing director is asked to answer it – prepare for strong opinions to be thrown around.

Anand A. Vathiyar, the Singapore-born managing director of marketing agency Up Brand Buzz, believes Singapore “is a creative wasteland that lacks a distinct culture or even a soul”.

“We [Singapore] are third-rate imitators in everything we do…from business to arts, to our way of life,” he says. “The advertising industry is a teeny tiny part of Singapore’s so-called creativity and frankly, we are too self-serving as an industry to be taken seriously.”

Virginia Ng, KFC’s senior marketing director, stopped short of calling Singapore’s advertising industry a creative wasteland but admitted marketers here weren’t game enough to take on the most brave work sometimes because “it’s part of our [Singapore] culture to be not as daring”. Richard Bleasdale, Iris Worldwide’s CEO for APAC, refuses to blame the client side.  “Agencies have to take control of their own industry and their own destiny,” he says. “People forget that a key part of our job is to ‘sell’ our work – clients buy confidence and commitment at the end of the day.”

Of course, it’s not just Singapore’s marketing and advertising community which has, in the past, had its creative credentials questioned before. As a nation the island-state has tended to be viewed as creatively dim by much of the Western world. Ask foreigners what Singapore equals and you’ll get the similar responses of good food, efficiency and excellent customer service but you’ll be hard pressed to find compliments on creativity. And in the advertising world, winning at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival is generally regarded as the highest compliment you can pay a piece of creative work. Which now begs the question on how has Singapore’s performances been at Cannes compared with other south east Asian rivals such as Thailand and Malaysia.

Tale of the tape
Singapore had a disappointing performance at Cannes in 2008 only picking up nine Lions as compared to the 19 Lions it won the previous year, while Thailand and Malaysia bagged 15 Lions and 11 Lions this year respectively. But Andy Greenaway, Saatchi & Saatchi’s regional creative director, who isn’t one to shy away from controversial topics, says Singapore’s creativity “has not come down in the last ten years”.
“We will always have our down years, but we always manage to bounce back,” he says.
If you look at Singapore agencies’ Cannes Lions hauls in the last five years (see Table 1) the figures tend to back Greenaway’s point. Singapore is actually ahead of, in terms of the number of Cannes Lions, rivals like Thailand and Malaysia. And if you go back a further five years, Singapore’s medal tally against the two SE Asian markets looks even healthier.

Table 1 shows Cannes Lions totals for selected Asian nations over the last five years.

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Total
Hong Kong 0 1 1 1 2 5
Indonesia 0 0 0 2 1 3
Japan 18 11 13 21 26 89
Korea 1 1 0 1 1 4
Malaysia 4 4 11 12 11 42
Singapore 13 13 12 19 9 66
Thailand 7 12 9 12 15 55
The Philippines 0 1 3 4 1 9
Vietnam 0 0 0 1 2 3

Table 2 shows Cannes Lions totals for selected Asian nations over the last ten years.

 Total (1999 – 2008)
Hong Kong 14
Indonesia 3
Japan 99
Korea 8
Malaysia 44
Singapore 94
Thailand 72
The Philippines 10
Vietnam 4

Differing views
Strong performances at award shows have always been an easy way to compare the creativity of a market against another, but today’s economy calls for greater accountability and increased ROI pressure on the marketer – the definition of creativity is changing. Of the collection of some 20 over advertising and marketing industry players we spoke to – only a small handful believed award shows were a suitable yardstick to measure creativity. “What other measures do we have?” BBDO’s celebrated creative Jagdish Ramakrishnan says. “Creativity and effectiveness aren't mutually exclusive. Some people perceive creative awards as being only about creativity. But big brand marketers realise that in this competitive age, to be effective, you have to be creative. You have to amuse. You have to entertain. The more customers love your brand, the more they prefer it,” he says.

Defining good creative work is very subjective – is it the work’s ability to sell a product or its ability to connect and generally entertain the audience? Iris’ Bleasdale says it’s both. “I don’t believe you can bore people into buying brands. And I don’t believe our job is just to entertain people,” he says.
Up Brand Buzz’s Vathiyar, who is very critical of Singapore’s creative standards, adds that there are “many yardsticks but the one that is, or used to be, the gold standard is D&AD’s doing common things uncommonly well or doing something uncommon with commercial relevance”. “But the starting point for any standard to be applicable is that the work must meet a client’s brief/need,” he says.

However it’s hard to put Singapore’s achievement over the last ten years at the D&ADs (see Table 3) into context until you see what South Africa’s, a market which has been submitting close to the same amount of entries as Singapore, results are (see Table 4).

Table 3 shows D&AD achievements for Singapore in the last ten years.

Year In-Book Nomination Yellow Pencil Total
1998 6 0 0 6
1999 4 0 0 4
2000 13 0 0 13
2001 17 2 0 19
2002 13 1 0 14
2003 24 7 1 32
2004 23 2 1 26
2005 14 1 0 15
2006 12 2 2 16
2007 24 3 1 28
2008 23 3 0 26
Total 173 21 5 199

Table 4 shows D&AD achievements for South Africa in the last ten years.

Year In-Book Nomination Yellow Pencil Total
1998 5 0 0 5
1999 6 0 0 6
2000 9 0 1 10
2001 15 1 0 16
2002 9 0 0 9
2003 10 0 1 11
2004 9 3 0 12
2005 10 0 0 10
2006 16 3 0 19
2007 12 5 4 21
2008 9 1 1 11
Total 110 13 7 130

However, the charts are only relevant to the argument if it is understood award shows are the best judge of creativity, which is not the case. “I don’t go visiting an award winning lawyer, banker or doctor,” Nicholas Ye, who is the creative partner for local creative hotshop The Secret Little Agency, says.

“The only way to judge creative credentials is by looking at the work and its results. If that work is award winning, that’s a bonus, but not a prerequisite for judging credentials,” he says.
Saatchi’s Greenaway concurs, and says “the purpose of great creative work first and foremost is to sell product” and called any agency which priority was not based on sales and building a client’s brand a “fool”.

Marketers often don’t understand why agencies are so obsessed with the need for prize recognition, often viewed by clients as an agency being too self-indulgent. Of course, that’s not to say all marketers can’t see the benefits of working with award winning agencies. An agency which wins tons of awards will open their business to new recruitment possibilities. The best creatives will want to work at the award winning agencies, and marketers want to work with reputable creatives.

“As a client, I do care a lot about the creative minds who work on our projects – it makes a huge difference. But I look at the clients they have worked for and what they have produced for their past clients. If I find a creative who delivers on what we need, I insist on them working on our accounts,” Elena Arabadjieva, director of marketing for Resorts World at Sentosa, says. “Agency credentials matter as a whole – their clients, track record – awards are just a part of it”.

We’re better than them
Award shows statistics aside, Singapore’s biggest threat in being relegated to the depths of a creative wasteland will come from Thailand first and maybe Malaysia as well. Advertising in both SE Asian markets has come of age and succeeded in creating a distinct identity – and also appear to have things going in their favour such as bigger resources and budgets. Graham Kelly, TBWA\ Singapore’s executive creative director, believes Singapore’s level of creativity has not dropped – “it’s static” – and in the case of Thailand and Malaysia, both countries “have caught up”.

Putting that opinion aside for a money, for the reasons of higher costs, lower budgets and limited resources Singapore never really has been a TV market and the gulf in class is evident in the TVCs coming from Thailand when compared to our local efforts.
“You can’t blame the [Singapore] creatives for this one,” BBDO’s Ramakrishnan says.
“That flavour is also the voice, tone and humour of a large middle class. Now the middle class in Singapore is not comfortable where it is. The country has not made its peace with the HDB Block image and the Singlish voice,” he says. “Hence the brand marketers' call to make their TV commercials aspirational. They insist that every element of their ads, from talents and wardrobe to sets, props and voice-overs, are aspirational. But there can be no flavour or personality in 'aspirational'.”

“Going forward it’s going to get worse [for Singapore] as TV budgets get slashed,” Greenaway says. “We need to focus on the things we are good at.” Singapore has a good reputation for print, ambient media, new media, guerilla and technology based communications but while McCann Singapore’s ECD, Farrokh Madon, believes the “quality of Singapore advertising has improved”, in the new digital age “the West and Japan are far ahead off us in terms of the client’s acceptance of breakthrough ideas in the digital space and use of the medium.”

Madon, who is responsible for the much-talked about Raffles Place Ghost work for GMP, says “clients will have to keep pace with the changes in the advertising world, to make the most of the creative talent which exists in Singapore.” A common theme felt by many agencies here in Singapore – and, it seems, marketers too. Martin Low, VP of marketing for Sennheiser Electronic Asia, wasn’t the first marketer contacted for this cover story who bemoaned the “decline in the quality of young marketers in Singapore today”. He says: “This [lack of quality] could be due to a lack of passion and the fact that they don’t strive for excellence anymore. Many dare not venture beyond conventional. As long as the design is good enough for their bosses to accept or good enough for the masses, it’s good enough for them.”

It starts with you
An ability to be creative is the lifeblood of any advertising agency. Maintaining a steady level of creative juices flowing throughout the shop requires talent. The myth that Singapore fails to attract top talent is exactly that – a myth. Singapore has no problem attracting creative talent; holding on to them is another matter. “It’s full on here, there’s very long hours,” Todd McCracken, Ogilvy & Mather Singapore ECD, says. McCracken has worked in advertising in several countries – New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia. He says the work in Singapore is “very print and digital based, there’s very little on the film and radio side”, which means it is hard to keep creatives in Singapore interested over a long period.

In the last ten years, Singapore’s creativity at award shows has been represented by a selection of well known faces who have come and gone. The likes of Neil French and David Droga to name a few, but today the issue may well be less about attracting talent and more about utilising it properly. Especially in the account management department where many Singapore agencies, according to Iris’s Bleasdale, have taught them to be “bag carriers and administrators.”

“Account management people used to be psychologists, scientists, sales people, debaters, insightful thinkers, entrepreneurs, passionate about creativity and their clients brands,” he says.

Bleasdale, who is a well-known and outspoken advocate against scam advertising also says, “Singapore has allowed its best creative talents to play with themselves rather than with their clients and their brands. I think the vast majority of creative awards entries and winners that come out of Singapore are scam work. Since the vast majority isn’t real work, it can’t be seem as a true measure of Singapore’s creativity or creative potential.”

If we can skip the monster debate on scam ads for the time being, Sennheiser’s Low says “the real challenge” is “how the commercial environment in Singapore will enable them [up-and-coming creative talent] to bloom?”

“Unlike countries like Japan, the Singapore market is very small,” he says. “We don’t have a big enough niche market or enough early adopters to spawn creativity. As a result, many of our creative talents end up churning out creative pieces that will cater to the masses.  It's not their fault but this is reality and commercialisation, and this I think is the root of the problem.”