The Irreplaceable, at the Table
Thomas HongTack Kim chairs the international jury in Tashkent and takes the keynote stage in Manila — in a single month, the case for irreplaceable creative talent becomes record.
In an age when machines can generate endlessly, the scarcest capability left is judgment — the human eye that decides what is actually good. This autumn, Thomas HongTack Kim made that case not as an argument but as record.
Over three weeks, Kim — represented by IWBFD Studios and the lead of its Creative ACT Collective — sat at two of Asia's most consequential creative tables.
On October 3–4 in Tashkent, Kim served as Jury Chairman and Board Member of the Creative & Marketing category at Jolbors Awards International, the global arm of the 14-year-old festival born in Central Asia and now expanding worldwide. He chaired a bench drawn from houses including VML, BBDO, Wieden+Kennedy, Burson and Droga5 — deciding, among global peers, what the year's best work would be.
Twelve days later in Manila, Kim took the keynote stage at DigiCon 2026, the flagship convention of the Digital Marketing Association of the Philippines, held October 15–16 at the Manila Marriott under the theme INTERPLAY. His keynote shared the program with chief creative officers from Edelman, Impact BBDO and Ogilvy, and with The One Club for Creativity.
In both rooms, Kim is credited through his own Seoul agency, 2kg, and a career that runs from executive creative leadership at Cheil to founding his own studios. But the throughline is simpler: the people invited to judge the work, and to set the agenda for an entire industry, are the least replaceable people in it.
This is exactly the kind of career IWBFD Studios exists to represent. As his agency, the studio backs talent that AI, robotics and the logic of capital cannot replace, and designs the projects that let that talent reach the world. Kim's Creative ACT Collective is one such project — a practice conceiving and developing creative-agency-based brand-activism IP, built on the belief that creativity should move something real in the world, not merely sell.
Tashkent and Manila are not a finish line; they are two points on a widening circuit. Kim is working to open a place for North Asian creativity on these global stages — a bridge for Korea, China and Japan into festivals that, until now, have been drawn largely from elsewhere.
About Creative ACT Collective — Led by IWBFD Studios' two talents, Thomas HongTack Kim and Paul J. J. Kang, Creative ACT Collective is a meta-agency model: it conceives and develops creative-agency-based brand-activism IP while setting the template for a new, borderless creative agency.
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