Dentsu Creative Taiwan’s Chief Creative Officer, Alice Chou spoke at Spikes Asia 2024 this week sharing the story of how Taiwan broke out onto the global stage, challenging the industry across Asia to leverage the powerful and rich diversity in the region and create world-class creative ideas.
Chou shared the story of how her career began 25 years ago, in a world very different from today. For the first 15 years, she lived and worked in a small client-centered advertising community in Taiwan. But Creativity wasn’t always the priority. It wasn’t enough.
It was a calm mix of patience and persistence that led to not only the Grand Prix for the creatively-driven Chou – but a new era for creativity in the market and her Keynote at Spikes this week.
Creativity is often marginalized as a way to drive client growth
The story charts an age-old creative battlefield – remaining heads down within the client brief and heads up looking out across the rest of the industry.
Her work started with strengthening the creative connection between creativity and growth and whilst sometimes that meant compromising, her outlook remained looking for both a creative and a commercial “home run”.
As long as I don’t give up, a compromise isn’t a compromise
It is this unwavering commitment that landed Alice the perfect brief a couple of years later. She explained poetically “In an era of change holding onto belief is a form of courage”
She put this philosophy into a context where in a digital age there is a big shift in how things are working, with the breaking down of old systems, and cultural behaviours and the making of new ones.
Chou explained that the internet’s covering of the globe has created its own organic and vibrant world – one that never pauses and only grows larger and it is in this new universe that everyone can connect and explore more freely.
Her question to Asian creatives and marketers? Are we scared of change, are we rushing to catch up?
Chou’s answer:
“If we can close our eyes and deeply understand our own culture, open our eyes to see what the outside world truly needs, connect the two together with one eye open and one eye closed.
Our creativity, rooted in our culture, can take us anywhere in the world.”
