Meet the Judges: Part 3

We sat down with Rene Rouleau (VP Creative Director at BIMM, Toronto), Leia Rogers (Creative Director & Managing Partner at Rethink, Vancouver), Dominic Prevost (Associate Creative Director at 123West, Vancouver), Gail Pak (Creative Director at Zulu Alpha Kilo, Toronto). and Nick Ostini (Art Director at SET Creative and ASK Agency, Portland) to pick their brains on a few topics following the 2018 ACE Awards Judges Breakfast.

Q: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in marketing over the past 5 years?

Rene: Awards shows being inundated with cause campaigns. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing, but they definitely win. I think part of this is because of the growing nature of people wanting to interact online and have authentic, real experiences.

Leia: The need to produce videos for social, faster. It’s caused us to change the way we work and become much more nimble. This demand has brought a lot of production in-house so we can produce videos both quicker and cheaper because it’s what our clients are demanding.

Dominic: The democratization of all our tools. We can now shoot a 4K video with our phones or buy fancy drones to get amazing shots for a couple hundred bucks. So yes, deadlines might be shorter and budgets tighter, but we have more tools now than we’ve ever had before to make the work look as good as possible.

Gail: Case study videos. There’s a lot more time and craft spent on them because you don’t want to put in tons of work for a project and not have it reflected or shown clearly to your audiences or judges.

Nick: From a retail perspective, with Brick and Mortar stores struggling to get people in because of the advances of online shopping, it’s the increasing need for creating memorable experiences. Younger generations want to come into a store and have an interactive experience with something.

We’ve got one more post next week and don’t forget to get your tickets to the 39th Annual ACE Awards!