|
|
JURY CHAIRMAN, STEVE HATCH | JOINT MANAGING DIRECTOR | MEDIAEDGE:CIA UK
In choosing my jury I wanted two things; people who are active practitioners, those who know the day-to-day challenges of creating great work; and those that have 'on the ground' experience of multiple markets. In Nick, Peter, Marco, Mathew and Anthony not only did I have a pack of award winners but also people with experience from Milwaukee to Moscow and from Cape Town to Cardiff.
In the judging process we were looking for three key elements: a clear insight, a great idea and brilliance in activation. the jury members from each agency were asked to select their best work from around the world from which the best twenty, two winners and the Crème de La Crème were decided. This was the hard part.
What media companies do these days is way beyond the 20th century definition of planning and buying advertising space. Being at the nexus of technological innovation and global media brands what they do these days is CREATE, and they are very, very busy. Our hard task was made harder but having to compare not one ad with another, but a TV series with a dog lovers' website, the world's first IPTV station with a movement for creative shaving, a two hundred foot condom with a computer game to reduce knife crime.
A rigorous voting process and some hot debate led us to our winner of the first media Crème de la Crème award who are Naru R - holistic Planning director and Fer Wang - Director ESP Mediacom China for the Pantene "Shining Path".
In Shining Path the team took a clear insight of how the desire for young girls to be special is magnified a hundredfold in a population of over 1.3 billion and turned it into a compelling piece of content, namely a TV show searching for the new face of Pantene. the jury loved this modern interpretation of audience participation and what gave Shining Path the edge over other entries was its SCALE. these days the word content is part of our communications vernacular often used with few measures of its success but Shining Path delivered big time achieving a peak time audience of over 40 million viewers and generating over one million blogs. A great example of smart people working with BIG companies and delivering BIG results. Congratulations to them both.
Almost every entry deserved to be in our top twenty and though we did finally settle on a worthy recipient for the crème de la crème we were bowled over by the quality of thinking, creativity and pure innovation that's being created by the media companies working within WPP. We all left the jury room feeling humbled, inspired and with one thing on our minds... "I can’t wait to steal those ideas".
|
|