Eurobest is the most important global celebration of creativity in Europe, bringing together advertising, public relations, marketing and other industries to discuss the latest trends and examples of the best work around the region. We will be reporting live throughout the festival and tweeting on @HK_EMEA.

Day one, in Rome, the weather is gorgeously sunny, and bitterly cold. It’s hard not to admire the plucky giant tucking tourists at 10am next to the Trevi Fountain, like the site oriented hotel, Roma’s Palazzo Barberini..

First, if you want to hold a three-day conference encouraging people from all over the world to gather and discuss creativity, there’s no better place than Palazzo Barberini. The common cry over coffee was over the ceiling in the main auditorium (better than the Sistine Chapel, as such a creative reflected).

As for the sessions, Day One focused attention on the difficult issues: the state of creativity and its relevance in 2016.

Has creativity lost its value?

This depressing question was asked by some of the speakers during Day One. CP+B opened the festival with this challenge for the public – has our industry lost sight of the most important thing we sell? Do traders no longer feel empathy for their consumers, as Sylvain Labs later asked With so much advertising out there, has our industry become predictable?
The answer is, of course, no, but it’s still easy to fall into the predictability trap. With the help of neuroscientist Balder Onarheim, CP+B has come to speak to the public in a couple of ways that you can train your brain every day to be unpredictable. To challenge yourself, so you can create a challenging and unique job for your clients.

Train your brain to be random – Think of three random, disconnected words quickly. Have I tried? It’s harder than it sounds. If you do this for a few seconds every day, your brain will begin to create more remote associations.
Use Random Wikipedia – If you’re already stuck with an idea, go to Random Wikipedia. Then challenge yourself to use an idea from this page to inform your idea.
The best creative campaigns aren’t built in a day

From the success of a 30-year customer campaign among the insurance company

 Centraal Beheer and advertising agency DDB, from JWT’s “The Next Rembrandt”, it is clear that creativity takes time and patience for a perfect performance. This year JWT merged the creativity and technology to teach a computer how to paint as Rembrandt.

The painting itself was revealed with a series of ‘oohs’ from the audience here at Eurobest, but what was left more of the conversation than even the incredible AI technology, was just how much work had gone into this work of art. JWT took us through all the pitfalls, how long it took to train and retrain a computer to paint as his Grand Master, from details like the right mustache to the perfect painting texture. This was an inspiring work painfully turned out of technology and the actual business was as impactful in person as any Rembrandt we saw.
Stay tuned for day two.