With a track record like Tribal DDB it’s hardly a surprise that they became interactive agency of the year at Eurobest this year. Throughout the year they’ve been making great and award winning work for KLM and Philips. The climax of their award victory march has been Eurobest this week; out of the 12 nominations they won 9 awards – for Philips Obsessed with Sound 4, for ‘Wake up the town‘ 2, and for KLM Tile & Inspire 3. What really took us by surprise was ‘The Legendary Making of The Date’ for Heineken by Wieden+Kennedy winning a Grand Prix in film. We already noticed that every big budget commercial nowadays gets a making of to create some relatively cheap content – and PR for the agency, for that matter. But actually winning a Grand Prix with the side project of a campaign is quite something. Back then we said: “Not your standard ‘making of’, but one made with ‘joie de vivre’ and lots of CG jokes. If we weren’t already, this would want to make us work in advertising”. The commercial itself, ‘The Date’, also won silver in film, and ‘The Entrance’ won gold. We were told that AKQA’s London office sent in the work of AKQA Amsterdam, so you could say that the Grand Prix and Gold in Mobile for Heineken Star Player (social betting on football matches), also went to Amsterdam. DBB and 180 won silver in film for ‘Old Lady’ (Volkswagen) and ‘Marked for Life’ respectively. We also had the Epica awards last week. W+K won 5 Epica’s plus a Grand Prix for ‘The Entrance’ and ‘The Date’ combined. Again W+K won an award (gold) for the ‘extra’s’ – some extra mini scripts around ‘The Entrance’. 180’s Marked for Life won gold and silver. Finally Lemz did well with 2 silver and 2 bronze for IKEA 365, KLM Live Reply, and ‘Children see things differently‘. In total Amsterdam won 22 Epica awards. One final note to Eurobest and Epica; can you guys please merge? There’s no reason to have two identical continental award shows – except making lots of money, of course…

About a year ago Massive Music decided to give away a custom designed Gibson – in the colors of its visual identity. The contest was simple; conceive a nickname for the guitar and the best name will win the guitar. Wouter Boon – strategist and editor at Amsterdam Ad Blog – won the guitar dubbing it ‘The Ripple’. Massive Music founder Hans Brouwer; “Out of 192 names, we chose The Ripple through a democratic process; all our agencies around the world were allowed to vote. It was a close call, but eventually ‘The Ripple’ was liked best.” The other finalists were ‘LollyRock’ (Heinrich Vejlgaard, freelance creative in Denmark), and ‘Rockwork Orange’ (Floris Cobelens, marketing director at Heineken). Massive asked Gibson to make 6 customized guitars in total, also one for each office – next weekend Massive is officially opening its 5th office in London. Boon: “It’s funny, when I saw the guitar I instantly knew ‘The Ripple’ should be its name, since it matched so well with the design. I am really glad I won and feel obliged to take some lessons now!”

Paul Lavoie, Taxi, talking about the power of doubt at the Tomorrow Awards

Yesterday we were at the Tomorrow Awards, the award show that is to inspire the industry to innovate faster, as Ignacio Oreamuno explained in his welcome speech. It proved quite a long afternoon – at some point turning into a night – if you take into account that only 5 awards were given away. It helped that the event, held at Pakhuis de Zwijger along IJ river, was sponsored by Absolut and some other hard liquor brands and was hosted by the hyper active Haley Mancini of Boom Chicago. There was also some improvisational, interactive theater by some actors who perform occasionally at Boom Chicago to keep the crowd going, but only at the end of the evening this seemed to pick up – when the bottles on the tables started to empty. The most interesting part of the show were the four speakers leading some of the best agencies in the world; Paul Lavoie (Taxi), talking about doubt as an essential ingredient for great work and showing an 8 minute film he just made about the last two days of Vincent van Gogh’s life; Nick Bailey (AKQA) talking intelligently about AKQA’s many ‘human platforms’; Carl Johnson (Anomaly), announcing his new office in Amsterdam and wisely stating that the digital era needs more collaboration and less ego; and finally Jean-François Bouchard who very entertaingly and convincingly showed how at Sid Lee underwear is the preferred dress and crazyness key. There was one thing that all the speakers seemed to agree on; we live in exciting times. You’d almost forget that there were also some awards to give away. The winners were: Skype in the Classroom, Made by Many (UK); Halo Reach, AKQA (USA); What Do You Love, Big Spaceship and Google Creative Lab (USA); HypoSurface, Mark Goulthorpe (inventor) USA; Les Paul, Google Doodle Team & Google Creative Lab (USA). All cases were, as Oreamuno promised at the beginning of the show, digitally advanced. It was a pity though that there were only Anglo-saxon winners. But since this is only the second year of the Tomorrow Awards, it probably just needs some more time to get discovered by the rest of the world. In any case, we definitely agree with Oreamuno; less awards is more.

The Tomorrow Awards are being hosted in Amsterdam next week. The founder of the awards, Ignacio Oreamuno – also the founder of the creative platform ‘I have an idea’ and the international Portfolio Night – introduced this bi-annual award show to celebrate work that pushes the technological boundaries. What is special about the awards is that there are no categories, that ‘the crowd’ is used to make the first round of eliminations, that the entire judging process is filmed and shared as a small documentary so that people can learn from it, and finally, that there are only 5 winners. Enough reasons to ask Ignacio a few questions.

When and how did you come up with the idea to start a new award show?
I started the Tomorrow Awards in 2010 because I wanted to create an international award show that served the advertising industry by not just awarding great work, but teaching the agencies about where advertising is going. I had worked with all the major international award shows for years and at one point I realized “Hey I don’t have a TV anymore, I don’t subscribe to print media, and yet I go to award shows that still award things based on the way the past worked.” I don’t believe I need to ask for permission to change my industry, so I created the Tomorrow Awards to compete directly with the big award shows and serve a higher purpose in the industry.

It’s a bi-annual event. Doesn’t that feel a bit contradictory to the exclusiveness you want to create by only giving away 5 awards?
The reason we give only 5 trophies each season is because each winner is meant to give agencies a specific lesson to take home. For example, R/GA’s Pay with a Tweet from last season taught us that agency should consider to fund their own social media platforms in-house and develop them without an actual client.

At the same time the Tomorrow Awards is bi-annual because the rate of innovation in advertising has changed. The award shows that take place once a year award work that was entered last year that sometimes was produced year and a half ago. By the time the prizes are awarded it is too late to learn from them. Every time we do a new judging it is incredible to see how much technology has advanced and how much the work changes.

So, no, I don’t see it as contradictory.

In a recent article on ‘I have an idea’ you said that most industries adjust to change and that the advertising world is an exception. Doesn’t your award prove the opposite?
Since the Mad Men days of advertising, not a lot has changed. We resist change, but I think that the world has moved on and we have to catch up with it. The purpose of the Tomorrow Awards is to help the industry navigate through change by squeezing the know-how out of all the work that is pioneering and present it to account people, creatives, and producers at agencies that are still working like Mad Men.

How are the ‘Monster Judges’ selected?
The chairman of the Monsters selects them. The first Chairman was AKQA’s Rei Inamoto and our current Chairman is Robert Wong, the creative director of Google Labs. We pick Monsters so that the jury is balanced not just internationally but also by where they work. I like to have a balance of massive global agencies, independent agencies, and digital agencies.

Most award shows are money machines. What about the Tomorrow Awards?
Award shows have categories for the simple reason that it makes them lots of money and ironically the more categories they create the less value an award represents. And yet agencies keep sending in work. Rei Inamoto, our first Monster Chairman, was the one that helped stone this in. When we started the awards he said; “No categories”. And we did just that. So an entry in the Tomorrow Awards could have multiple tactics, as long as it’s part of the same campaign.

What is, in your opinion, the most impressive case submitted so far?
I love most of the shortlisted work in all seasons, but The Human Jukebox from Sweden tops the crazy factor. The shop owner of an audio shop swallows an internet controlled speaker that playes song requests as it plays through his colon.

Ignacio has two tickets to give away for the awards show next Tuesday. If you retweet the article or ‘Like’ it, you might win one!

Picture: ECD’s W+K Amsterdam Mark Bernath (left) and Eric Quennoy (middle), mainly responsible for Wieden+Kennedy’s huge success in Cannes and Enrico Balleri from Nike, just after the award ceremony last Saturday. What a great closing night for the Amsterdam agency it was. Nike Write the future scored seven more Lions – earlier in the week it already won gold in Cyber. At the most important award night the Amsterdam agency first of all won the prestigious Grand Prix in film. It was a very close finish with Puma’s ‘After hours athlete’ as jury chair Tony Granger (CCO Y&R) explained at the press conference. After a lengthy discussion he asked the jury to put all the rational arguments aside and vote from the heart. This gave Nike the final push. Nike also won five Lions in Film craft: two Gold (Editing and Script), two Silver (Production and Sound), and one bronze (CG). And the seventh Lion, Gold in Integrated, proved that the campaign didn’t just have a pretty face. And then Heineken; for this other power brand W+K won five Lions in Film and Film craft. Four for The Entrance: Film: Gold and Bronze (interactive). Film craft: Gold and Silver (Direction and Sound Design). One Lion went to The Date – more or less the sequel of The Entrance. It won bronze in Film. This brought the grand total for Wieden+Kennedy to 13 (!) Lions. Together with all the Lions that Portland won for Old Spice, W+K must easily be the most awarded independent network in the world. Two more Amsterdam Lions went to MINI ‘Flow‘ (Silver in Film craft) by BSUR and one to Volkswagen’s ‘Old Lady’ (Bronze in Film) by DDB. All in all Amsterdam (officially) won 25 Lions, 8 (!) more than last year.

With 13 shortlist nominations in film and 7 in film craft, Amsterdam should be able to win some more Lions tomorrow night. Of all these nominations 4 go to Nike ‘Write the future’, 3 to Heineken’s ‘The Entrance’, and one to Heineken’s ‘The Date’, which adds up to an impressive 8 film (craft) nominations for Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. Write the future also has a nomination for Titanium (integrated), though this case was sent in by Nike. BSUR also does well with 4 nominations for MINI Countryman’s ‘Flow’. Philips’ ‘Wake up the town’ by Tribal DDB has 3 film nominations. Other film nominations go to Volkswagen (DDB), Centraal Beheer (DDB) – we personally liked this more subtle Centraal Beheer film a lot better – De Bijenkorf (Selmore), IDFA X-ray eyes (TBWA) – a very smart film – and the beautiful Sire film ‘Marked for life‘ (180). We’ll keep our fingers crossed!

Yesterday was a good day. Not just because it was our first day in Cannes and we enjoyed soaking up all its extremes – Le Palais, the sun, the beach, ‘le canard au miel’, and lots of drinks – check out our photo’s here. It was also a good day for Amsterdam, because it won 5 Lions! Two silver lions went to outdoor; Interbest ‘mail stripper’ and the Go Fast water-bike, both to Y&R Not Just Film. At the time, we weren’t too positive about the unattractive stripper, because we doubted its effectiveness. You could say the silver lion has proved us wrong. Two bronze lions went to the radio commercial ‘sexual harassment’ (Publicis) and an Allsecur outdoor ad (Ogilvy). In Media Muse and Starcom won Silver for their 3D Samsung projection. Earlier, on Monday Amsterdam won two meager bronze lions; the Dutch dress for Bavaria in promo – which definitely deserves more in our opinion – and bronze for Boondoggle’s KLM Suprise in PR – in Holland this won a golden Spin (read: cyber) award. Hopefully we’ll be able to celebrate some gold later this week.

Our first day in Cannes! We’re going to keep a photolog this week, so any tips on interesting (preferably Amsterdam related) activities are welcome – like winning a Lion for example. We look forward seeing you and (maybe) getting a little tipsy together!