Lucía Ongay, President and Co-Founder of the Gerety Awards, led a panel of leading creatives at ADFEST 2026 to explore “The Conversations That Reshape Creativity.” She was joined by Pannarai Juanroong, Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy Bangkok; Anna Fawcett, Chief Executive and Executive Producer of Filmgraphics Entertainment; and Shruthi Subramaniam, Executive Creative Director of BBDO India, who joined forces to urge us to step away from the keypads, embrace productive friction, and start having real-world conversations again.
Lucia first posed the question of the keys to effective creativity in their creative process. Shruthi urged us to embrace randomness. Not all ideas have to make immediate sense or come from obvious places, so be random and get creative. Anna identified trust, communication, and creative freedom as vital ingredients to successful client, agency, and production company relationships. Pannarai added that productive friction through healthy disagreements, debates, and vigorous fights to defend ideas also lead to more effective creative process.
The conversation moved fast as all three issued some warnings to the industry from different points in the process. Shruthi reminded us to keep it simple. More often than not, she said, many are chasing approval on LinkedIn by peers in the industry instead of talking to real people. Pannarai and Anna had additional reminders for brands to respect the consumer. Pannarai noted that in brands’ priority to get their messages out, they sometimes forget the core consumer insights and what consumers are feeling. Anna cautioned brands to remember their target audience, noting that in their quest for political correctness, they often risk seeming inauthentic. She also reminded brands that the respect must also be extended to the production process. That brands should keep the message simple, trust the team, give them the freedom to do their thing, do not micromanage directors as that is the surest way to kill them, and read the treatments! She also pointed to a loss that may seem minor, but it reflects the change in the nature of the relationships between brands, agencies, and production teams. Gone are the casual lunches, where people got to know each other and built the kind of trust that holds up under pressure.
Of course conversations on creativity need to address the elephant in the room, AI. The problem, they agreed, is not the technology itself but the habit of reaching for it too early. Shruthi aptly summed it up: "Think first, prompt later." It's about prioritizing human insight and conceptual exploration before relying on technology to fill the gaps; otherwise we are at risk of losing our uniqueness. Pannarai added she has seen this with many of her students who open their iPads straightaway, and their concepts come out much the same. AI is genuinely useful for repetitive grunge work, or to further improve on an idea,but ideation should always be Human Intelligence before Artificial Intelligence.. Human qualities like empathy, gut instinct, fallibility, originality are necessary to stir human emotions and give us goosebumps.
