Q: How many advertising people do you think made it onto Fast Company's recent list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business?

A: One.

That's right, just a single creative from our whole "creative industry". An industry that awards itself for "creativity" more than any other.

Of course, Elvis Chau of JWT Shanghai deserves full credit for this magnificent achievement. Imagine if he didn't make the list and we had no-one to represent our industry. How embarrassing would that be?

Ironically, even Elvis says, "Advertising is not that original."

Perhaps it's time for ad agencies and their clients to stop talking the talk about how to engage consumers who are already engaged with things far more engaging than advertising, get their heads out of their research reports, and start to produce something that is genuinely creative and entertaining.

Now there's an idea!

PC Air, based in Thailand, is the first airline in the world to feature transsexual flight attendants. Of course, the gags almost write themselves ("Did you order meat & 2 veg, sir?") but the most entertaining part of the Asian marketing launch has to be this TV commercial, which is absolutely priceless:

We're not sure which is our favorite shot - the close-up of the boy's shoes as they suddenly become stilletos, or the look on the guy's face when the flight attendant gives him his wallet back. Only in Thailand!

However, we can't help but think that PC Air may have missed a marketing opportunity with the name of their airline. 

Any suggestions?

Interestingly only one S.E. Asian country, the Philippines, features in the top 5 freelancing countries:

1. India 34%
2. United States 11%
3. Pakistan 9%
4. Bangladesh 6%
5. Philippines 4%

No Asian city makes it into the top 10 outsourcing cities - all are in the US.

This could be because Freelancer.com is specifically focused on the US market, or it could be that businesses marketing in Asia are yet to realise the potential of creative outsourcing.

But creative outsourcing's day may be coming, as the competitive advantage of building a flexible, multidisciplinary creative team at a lower cost becomes apparent to more and more entrepreneurs and SMEs advertising in Asia.

Here at Naïve we have seen it grow from nascent beginnings, to the point where creative outsourcing is becoming a realistic alternative to a mainstream agency for many smaller - and even some larger clients.

While Freelancer.com concentrates mainly on individual design items like logos, business cards, corporate identities etc, using freelance copywriters and designers it is now possible to source strategic brand planning, creative concepts and execution through the outsourced model. All without the bureaucracy, stifling processes and silo mentality that often come in dealing with a big traditional agency.

1.2 million jobs have been posted on Freelancer.com to date, and if one thinks of the potential for those marketing to Asia then the outsourcing model begins to look like an attractive business proposition.

Of course just like any business, reputation and trust will be vital as clients ponder the switch to an new and unfamiliar model. But once it has been proved that creative outsourcing can provide exactly what businesses in Asia need then creative outsourcing will really prove its worth.

In our travels through the agency world in Asia we often encounter a situation where client and creative department have become estranged.

In short the love has gone (if it ever existed in the first place).

It starts with the creative 'stars' who have tried and failed to make any impression on a client who, stubbornly resists their brilliant creative thoughts, and undoubtedly award winning ideas.

The recalcitrant client is then quickly dropped by the creative director, who moves on to focus on more productive and 'enlightened' clients. And so on down the food chain, until it lands up at either the solid uncomplaining creative team who are clinging to their jobs; a relatively junior team who are pleased to be working on anything or the freelancers who can't complain and just get on with it.

Trouble is, these clients marketing in Asia are often the ones who pay the bills; serious revenue that big agencies can't afford to lose. So when the client senses this lack of attention and kicks up a fuss, the big guns are ordered back onto the business and our unhappy client is smothered with love once again.

But of course it seldom lasts, passion quickly fades and the whole cycle begins again.

Perhaps there is an opportunity using creative marketing to reach out to these spurned clients: if only you can find the creatives to love them.

Partly this attrition is borne out of an Asian marketing sector experiencing continuous change through the growth of ‘digital’. Online media and mobile has exploded, and many large companies are now building their own, dedicated internal digital teams often recruiting directly from existing agencies.

With such obvious dissatisfaction amongst staff perhaps it is finally time for advertising agencies in Asia, who are struggling to retain their top creative talent, to consider a different model; a model that gives the creative team more freedom, flexibility and control.

The outsourced creative model, where creatives become independent operators coming together to work on specific projects is not new, but it’s one that agencies in Asia seem loath to experiment with, despite it offering a way to keep creative staff motivated and connected.

And it’s a model that is much better suited to today’s multi-platform world. A world where the leveraging of technology is so much more important to marketing in Asia. By breaking down the traditional agency barriers, art directors and copywriters can collaborate with digital specialists and creative technologists to utilize new technology, and to create new ways of engaging and involving consumers.

As pioneers of this model for Asian marketing we know, from our own experience, that it is a way of working that appeals to a lot of creative people. And it’s our view that happy people produce better work and tend to stick around.

At the end of the day it comes down to trust. Most agencies marketing to Asia are still tied to a 20th century factory model of employment, and expect to see bodies sitting behind desks; otherwise who knows what those crazy creatives will get up to when they are left to their own devices.

We’ve seen it time and time again: small clients marketing in Asia getting half service from their supposedly "full service" agencies.

Expensive, slow, unresponsive, and unimaginative are the complaints we hear often from our Asia marketing network.

So why do so many small clients stick with their big agency when they could be working with a smaller, nimbler, cheaper and probably much faster alternative?

In short a creative team that is a much better fit, and more suited to their business and marketing needs.

Is it ego? A desire to run with the big boys in Asian marketing? Or perhaps it’s a masochistic desire to be treated badly?

We’ve seen it so many times and yet it still remains a mystery.

Thanks to Copyranter for finding this little gem from Dove.

Whether the racism is intentional or not seems irrelevant to anyone who has worked in advertising for more than 5 minutes. The question has to be: How on Earth did this ad ever get through Unilever's research and approval process, and actually run?

According to Gawker, Dove released this statement regarding the controversial ad:

The ad is intended to illustrate the benefits of using Dove VisibleCare Body Wash, by making skin visibly more beautiful in just one week. All three women are intended to demonstrate the "after" product benefit. We do not condone any activity or imagery that intentionally insults any audience.

Having worked on Unilever in Asia recently, we find it astounding that the idea was not killed off after the first round of qualitative research, such is the client's sensitivity to anything remotely offensive or negative.

The problem appears to stem from the unfortunate layout which makes the 3 women appear as some sort of skin transformation from dark to light. Had the before/after skin demo been positioned below the headline, and the women rearranged into a non-tonal sequence, no-one would have been bothered.

Our own experience of working on Pond's skin-lightening beauty advertising in Asia gave us first-hand experience of just how sensitive beauty marketing can be:

Asian women love fair skin. And Asian men love women with fair skin. That's just the way it is. It's not racist. It's a sign of social status. Fair skin is the privilege of wealthy, urban women who live and work in air-conditioned comfort, cocooned from the brutal tropical sun. And dark skin is the curse of rural girls who live and work outdoors, often helping their families to plant and harvest the annual rice crop. So naturally, these girls want some of that fair-skinned beauty too.

What we found extraordinary is how many people who are not from Asia, find this concept of beauty to be racist and offensive.

A TV campaign we created for Pond's Flawless White attracted hundreds of angry comments on Youtube mainly from women in the western world, many of which were so loaded with profanities that they have since been removed. Fortunately however, the campaign was hugely successful in Asia and Latin America, and attracted adoring comments from these consumers.

But how is this Asian concept of beauty any different from caucasian people who find tanned skin attractive?

Tanned skin usually a sign of social status which shows that you have enough free time on your hands to lie in the sun, or are wealthy enough to fly to an exotic holiday destination and tan your buns while everyone else is shivering at home. And even if you can't make it to the beach there's always tanning salons, or spray-on tanning products as a last resort. (Never mind that you're irreversibly damaging your skin so you'll look like an old handbag by the time you're 40!).

But no-one in the western world seems to get angry about this concept of beauty. Asian women, on the other hand, find it ludicrous that anyone would want to lie in the midday sun to make their skin DARKER! Just go to any beach resort in Asia and count how many Asian women are lying there in their bikinis.

As we say in Asia: Same, same, but different.

An article that appeared this week says that Asian budget airlines are increasingly using social networks like Facebook to boost their business. The chief executive of Tiger Airways was quoted as saying that print media now barely figured in his company’s marketing budget. “Spending money on print advertising just seems so old-school now, so why do it?” he is reported as saying.

This is in the same week that TBWA announced the return of the Singapore Girl. This icon of gentle, gracious service will be winding back the clock and wafting her way through the streets of Paris, Jaisalmer and San Francisco on a TV near you soon - and yes she’ll be riding that tram again.

Obviously a budget airline takes a very different approach to its marketing, but it did get us wondering whether you could create anything as powerful and enduring as the Singapore Girl using social media alone.

She’s certainly dipped her toes into the digital world with the latest campaign previewed on YouTube. Time will tell whether she’ll move over completely or whether she’ll stay wedded to her "old-school" roots.

Jerry Della Femina’s "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" has been re-issued to capitalise on the success of Mad Men as it is, so we are told, the book that ‘inspired’ the series.

Having not read it first time around I took a look to see what I had missed. Apart from the dated language – it being the sixties, agencies were full of ‘hip cats’ – the three martini lunches, the drugs and the fact that very few of the agencies he mentions are still around there are some parallels with the business today.

His description of the older established agencies as desperately trying to appear with it but; ‘winding up looking like a fifty-year-old-lady who’s wearing a miniskirt and dressed like a kid’, could also describe some of the desperate attempts of today’s big agencies to catch and ride the digital wave.

Of course what he was describing was a creative revolution led by Bill Bernbach and DDB which dramatically changed the industry at the time. I am not sure what today’s revolution can be described as; a media revolution? A democratising revolution? A content revolution? One thing it doesn’t seem to be...at least not yet is a creative revolution.