Awards

Awards season keeps on rolling as you might have already heard that Funny or Die president Chris Bruss was named jury chair of the One Show Entertainment awards, which will take place on the left coast, specifically Santa Monica, on June 13 at the Museum of Flying. Back here in NYC, meanwhile, the Art Directors club has announced its first-ever Audience Award ahead of its 91st annual event. If you feel like playing critic and rating this year’s Gold Cube winners, click here.

The Cannes committee has rolled out its final jury lists and there are some notable names, as expected, in the bunch. Namely, Big Fuel’s founder/CCO Avi Savar will topline the Branded Content & Entertainment jury as president, Saatchi & Saatchi global digital creative director Tom Eslinger will oversee the Mobile Lions and Ivan Zacharias, director on the Stink roster, will take on the jury president role for the Cannes Film Craft Lions. Phew, thus ends our Cannes coverage, we think, until the actual fest gets underway. Check out the full jury lists after the jump.

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After hitting up an interesting ANDY Awards last night, which appeared that the organizers of the NYC event wanted to recreate where George Romero shot Day of the Dead,  perhaps our optimism has spiked this awards season. Yep, all we found out is that we’re still loved and hated, so, without further ado, we bring you the list for this year’s Grand Effie jury. Does any name sound familiar, frienemies?

Jeff Benjamin, CCO, JWT
Brad Brinegar, president/CEO, McKinney
Luis DiComo, EVP, global media, Unilever
Tim Ellis, EVP/CMO, Activision
Stuart Hazlewood, chief strategy officer, DDB NY
Jonathan Hoffman, chief experience officer, Starcom MediaVest Group
Nick Moore, CCO, Wunderman
Debra A. Sandler, president, Mars Chocolate North America
Iain Tait, global interactive ECD, Wieden + Kennedy
Jennifer Zimmerman, chief strategic officer, McGarryBowen

Once again, let’s eschew the drumroll and just get on with it. As you read this folks, we will be making our way to the ANDY Awards, which are taking place some place in midtown Manhattan. As embargo demands, we had to wait until this particular witching hour to bring you the big winner list, and topping it all with the Best in Show Grandy is CAA Marketing and Chipotle for their “Back to the Start” work. Guess a little reworking of Coldplay courtesy of Willie Nelson works wonders, as the animated storytelling project has also already received TED nods earlier this year.

Here are your other winners (and yes, we’ll try to add some pictures and clarification when we’re back and lucid).

The Top Winners

The agency networks that won the most 2012 ANDY awards are:

-Leo Burnett- 18 awards (6 Gold, 7 Silver and 5 Bronze) for Sydney, Toronto, Detroit, Mumbai, Shanghai, Chicago and Madrid;

-Y&R- 10 awards (4 Gold, 2 Silver and 4 Bronze) for Melbourne, Santiago  Chile, New York, Malaysia, Sao Paolo and London;

-Wieden + Kennedy- 7 awards (2 Gold, 4 silver and 1 Bronze) for Portland and New York;

- DDB, taking home 5 ANDYs (2 Silver and 3 Bronze) for London and Chicago;

- CP+B and production company MJZ each took home a total of 3 awards. CP+B won 2 Silver and 1 Bronze; MJZ took home 3 Gold with BETC Euro RSCG, 1 Gold and 1 Bronze with Strawberry Frog, and 1 Silver with Droga5.

Nearly two months after opening up shop in Melbourne and tweaking its leadership structure, MRM is turning its focus to, what else, the Cannes Lions–more specifically, the fest’s under-30 Young Lions competition. MRM has launched what it’s dubbed a “Cannes-Test” (ugh) for those Young Lion hopefuls across the agency network who are aching to go to this year’s event.

The agency has launched an internal site (which they won’t reveal to us, of course) for candidates 28 and younger to submit a homework assignment of sorts: Turn in one paragraph and one visual representation of why they are the best candidate to characterize “I am MRM.” Submissions will be judged on “passion, creativity, delivery of presentation” and “capacity to attract new young talent to MRM.” Sounds like a pretty tall order to us. We’ve been told that submissions are given a lot of liberty for creativity and the agency is hoping to get a visualization of “I AM MRM” out of the submissions.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to see them until an external site goes live in May (winner will be announced on May 14; deadline is April 27). Whoever wins, though, will earn that trip to Cannes, get a full-festival pass, accommodations and meals and something called an “MRM travel kit.” The only catch, though, is they have to create an “I Am MRM” blog and post regularly throughout the fest. That kind of knocks the wind out of the sails, doesn’t it?

We’ll do a little killing two birds with one stone this morning by letting you know the latest news from a couple of the most notable industry award shows of the year. First off, Cannes continues filling up its various jury rosters, this time announcing those who’ll be judging in the Creative Effectiveness, PR, Design and Film categories. Among those serving as presidents include Havas/Euro RSCG Worldwide CEO David Jones for Creative Effectiveness , Ogilvy worldwide CCO Tham Khai Meng for Film and Turner Duckworth namesake/creative Bruce Duckworth for Design.

We’ll spare you the full lists (you can go to the Cannes Lions site for those) since we’d rather focus on the bombastic images promoting this year’s ANDYs. From the looks of it, the Mayans and their 2012 predictions have gotten to the show’s organizers, who presume we want to spend the end of days huddled with them in the Hudson Hotel. Let the awards season madness begin.

The Cannes Lions 2012 jury announces roll on, with the latest concerning perhaps one of the most prestigious categories of them all: Titanium and Integrated. Leading the panel as jury president will be CP+B worldwide chief creative officer Rob Reilly, a nine-year vet at the MDC Partners agency who has picked up a Titanium or two along the way including one for Burger King in 2007 (Xbox “King Games”) and Best Buy (for Twelpforce) in 2010. The full Titanium and Integrated Lions lineup is below. We’re sure you’ll recognize a name or two.
Rob Reilly, worldwide CCO, CP+B, Global – Jury President
Mario D’Andrea, partner & CCO, Fischer&Friends, Brazil
Agnello Dias, CCO, Taproot India, India
Laura Desmond, CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group, Global
Andy DiLallo, CCO, Leo Burnett, Australia
Morihiro Harano, CD/founder, PARTY, Japan
Fred Koblinger, CEO, BBDO Group Vienna, Austria
Ted Royer, partner/ECD, Droga5, USA
Rob Schwartz, CCO, TBWA\Chiat\Day, USA
Fernando Vega Olmos, chairman and Worldwide Creative Council chairman, JWT Worldwide, Global

About a month ago, we told you about a clip that arrived in our tips box which featured someone tagging the Art Directors Gallery in Chelsea with a bunch of X’s. After spending just a few minutes debating whether this was a true act of vandalism or just a viral stunt, we were quickly informed that it was the latter and tied into a future ADC announce.

Well, folks, here you go. The spray-painting, er, effort is actually one element of a call-for-entries campaign, created by New York-based design/production studio Dress Code, for the Young Guns 10 competition.  Guess the “X” is a rather appropriate symbol then, but there’s plenty of hyperbole to go along with it as the ADC camp tells us the Roman numeral is also being used to represent the “mark of rebellion against mediocrity and traditional borders.” We’ll leave it to you to raise a first or roll your eyes.

Like always, ADC’s Young Guns is a challenge open to creatives 30 and under who have been working for at least two years, full-time or freelance. The organization will start accepting online entries starting March 13 and the deadline is May 8. Go here for more info.

Iain Tait, Wieden + Kennedy partner/global interactive ECD was gracious enough to provide us an exclusive sequel to Jeff Goodby’s tome from last year’s ANDY’s judging experience in the  British Virgin Islands. And now, for our 2012 ANDY’s Diary post, we give you a diary entry from Tait, who probably spent a hellacious week in Kauai, Hawaii. Take it away, sir.

As an advertising award, the ANDYs are pretty unique. It’s one set of judges that presides over work from the entire industry. Most other shows have separate juries for different disciplines. These different approaches lead to quite different experiences and results.

The ANDYs are different in another respect too: there’s a core of jury members who’ve been fairly consistent through a number of decades. Someone jokingly referred to it as Oceans 11 — a core of stalwarts with new folks imported to deliver special skills depending on the theft they’re about to perform. I don’t think that anyone was suggesting any kind of robbery, but I couldn’t say for sure.

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Our pal Josh Seifert, HUGE senior marketing strategist, returns with his monthly diatribe, this time discussing, yes, the Facebook Studio Awards, which we’ve touched on in the past. Are they worthy, are they relevant or are they even needed? Drop your science, sir.

The concept behind the Facebook Studio Awards really hits the nail on the head. When everything in digital can be measured, evaluated and judged based on some sort of performance metric—rightly or wrongly—the existing crop of industry awards doesn’t fully recognize and celebrate what is actually successful in digital. Unfortunately, awarding marketers for using what you’re shilling is so self-aggrandizing as to be nearly meaningless.
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