2008 Effie Awards, 40th Anniversary Journal
By admin • Nov 23rd, 2008 • Category: Design •
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2008 Effie Awards, 40th Anniversary Journal
by Advertising Age
Like today’s Advertising Age, which is about more than
advertising in the narrowest sense, the 40-year-old
Effies have blossomed into an award about something
more than just the effectiveness for which they were
named.
Of course, they’re still bestowed on work that works,
and that will always be their DNA, but the nature of the
winning campaigns is clearly changing. Where there was
once a notion that creativity and effectiveness were
an estranged couple who just happened to bump into
each other occasionally, today it’s pretty obvious they’re
joined at the hip—each other’s better half. If you’re not
giving consumers the information or entertainment they
want and want to share, you may as well be papering
the outhouse with your marketing dollars. Making the
logo bigger and cranking up the volume are marketing’s
equivalent of putting out your music on compact disc: It
still happens because a handful of people can still make
money from it, but it’s a game of diminishing returns.
Look at recent Grand Effie winners such as TBWA’s
campaigns for Apple (2007 and 2005). Their brilliance is
that they manage to be both simultaneously clever and
iconic while being mature enough never to sell overtly or
tell the consumer what to think. They get out of the way
and let the product do the talking. And, importantly, they
are easily imitated by consumers. Apple ads are a bunch
of components to be played with—they play into the
mashup culture, a fact that Apple and its agency have
embraced.
Similarly, the 2006 winner, the Dove campaign from
Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather, was all about entering into
a dialogue with consumers rather than conceiving of
communication as a little package dreamt up in a factory
somewhere, shipped out to some mass medium and
never seen again. Like the Apple ads, the campaign has
since sparked dozens of consumer imitations and almost
limitless dialogue in the blogosphere.
It’s no secret that marketing is a considerably more
complex business than it used to be or that those who built
their businesses around the seemingly inalienable reach
and power of broadcast have had to reimagine much of
what they do. But when you look at the work, it’s also clear
that that challenge is spurring more genuine creativity
than we’ve seen for years. That might not mean that 2008
will spawn the best crop of 30-second ads you’ve ever
seen—the best year for that format can almost certainly
be filed under “history of advertising.” However, it does
mean more interactivity with consumers (and thus real
measures of engagement with a brand), a keener focus
on ideas, the constant reinvention of media channels
and an encouraging shift beyond the self-serving and
counterproductive research techniques of years past and
into an era of actually listening to real, unfiltered feedback
from customers.
And it only gets more exciting from here on. While creativity
will only be more vital in ensuring effectiveness, good work
will also feature increasing elements of utility and social
and environmental sensitivity. Many agencies are already
working on creating products and applications that not
only speak positively to a brand’s attributes but are also
genuinely useful to the consumer or even beneficial to
society.
Think the Nike Plus running system, co-created by the
marketer and RGA; think Bank of America’s “Keep Your
Change,” program, co-created by the bank and Ideo. Think
New York shop Anomaly developing a women’s shaving
product called EOS, which has no foaming drying agent,
no pressurized container and is made of fully recyclable
plastic—it’s just launched in Target. or there’s Droga5,
with its “Million” project which is designed to put mobile
phones into the hands of every public school student in
New York—phones that’ll be personal computers during
the day (rather than distracting IM and SMS devices) and
phones only after school hours.
These examples, and there are others, are the leading
edge of where marketing is going—a bold adventure
into an era in which marketing adds real value for the
consumer and thus the brand. I am excited to continue
to report on such a fascinating evolution of the business; I
hope you are enjoying being part of the movement.
3 Letter from the President
4 Thank You to Our Sponsors
5 Creativity and Effectiveness: Joined at the Hip
6–84 Winners
86 The Green Effie
87 Grand Effie Judges
88-94 Judges and Moderators
95 Worldwide Effie Programs
96-97 World Effie Festival
98-99 Acknowledgments
104 Pages
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