On Friday, 14 August, the country's brightest marketing and advertising minds met at the Durban Convention Centre to attend the DSTV Seminar of Creativity, long a highlight of Loeries Creative Week.

Andrew Human, Loeries CEO getting the seminar started. © Gallo

Here are four of our our top tips from the day, all run through with a common thread...

1. You don't have to be everywhere to win everywhere

Chris Clarke is Chief Creative Officer of Digitas LBi International in London. He spoke of human creativity in the age of machines, pointing out that despite being a creative industry, there is lot of 'thou shalt' and sacred cows in the industry that we adhere to and are frankly wrong in doing as it places too much emphasis on merely ticking boxes and not enough on following your true calling and solving life's problems in a creative way that makes money. There's just too much of a rush to 'go all out on social' - you don't have to put everything on every platform all the time. In fact, if you follow a different approach and are selective in what you put out there, your message will go that much further. Taco Bell put this reverse psychology approach to good use with its 'social media channel shut down' - they left Twitter to trend on Twitter.

2. The transformative power of working on your personal projects

Ji Lee, creative lead of Facebook New York, is Korean, yet he grew up in Brazil and now lives in the US. Based on his interesting culture, he spoke of wanting to follow a career based on a great skill like that of design. As he started out he found that sticking to creative work in your work life only can be limiting, and so began his passion for constantly working on personal design projects in his free time that don't need to match up to a specific brief. If you're lucky enough to work in a job where you have fun, that's the ultimate, but many of us don't get the opportunity. Lee gave two examples of his personal projects: his 'word as image' project, which involves designing words as pieces of art as they are visual representations, and his 'bubble project', which takes things a step further by harnessing the power of the people - he designed simple blank 'speech bubble' stickers that he placed around the city and let others write in. As you'll see in the video below about his work, it's an interesting one as graffiti is illegal, but he didn't do any of the actual defacing himself... apart from sticker placement.

Lee's advice is to constantly work on personal projects as he's done, to keep your creative passion alive. Don't keep it to yourself though, as sharing your work makes great things happen. At the end of the day ideas are nothing, doing is everything - you just have to make it happen.

3. Add tech people love to innovate with an existing solution

Chuck Porter, partner/chairman of Crispin Porter & Bogusky - Colorado USA pointed out that we all want a piece of the social media pie but it's tricky as everyone's trying to figure out social together so we're all trying the same things at the same time. That doesn't mean it's impossible to get ahead of the pack, though. While it's hard to be the one to start a conversation online that trends for the right reasons, it's as simple as keeping track of what's being said online and adding comments to the conversation. As an example of this, he said "technology is amazing... it lets you see exactly how close your pizza is to your house after ordering." With Crispin Porter & Bogusky's help, Domino's Pizza took the idea of placing a call and waiting for your order to arrive a step further by incorporating emoji ordering - customers simply text a 'pizza slice' emoji through and their order is placed. This was such a good way of using technology to turn an existing process on its head that it went on to become a Cannes Lions Titanium winner this year:

4. Use advertising to creatively solve bigger global problems

Tim Lindsay, CEO of D&AD London, was the final speaker of the day. The D&AD pencil awards prove the value of creativity but with a different spin - using creativity to improve the fate of the earth, especially with the new White D&AD Pencil that encourages and rewards ethical marketing. There's no denying the impact of climate change, luckily there's been a rise of sustainability-centric business leaders like Richard Branson, which mean the earth 'has a chance'. But it shouldn't be limited to the few that already have status and huge funds at their disposal. "All business has a requirement for growth hard-wired into it," he said, but when we follow advertising's true mission of repurposing problems into solutions, we need to keep an eye on the cultural context and do what we can to fix the bigger global problems too, like inequality. The industry has a bigger role to play and we already are bigger than we realise, "we don't just sell toothpaste and build websites," he explained. It's all about ethical marketing at the end of the day - examples of this would be the Always 'LikeAGirl' campaign for Procter & Gamble by Leo Burnett, and the Cannes Lion 2014-winning video embedded below, 'Human Traffic Sign' for Shangai General Motors by Lowe China:

It's time for the industry to do more than just win awards - it's time to use that work to change the world.

For other highlights from the seminar, follow the hashtags #dstvseminarofcreativity and #dstvcreativeseminar.