Award « Amsterdam Ad Blog

Archive for the ‘Award’ Category

DAY wins red dots, UXUS the Tate Modern

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Amsterdam design agency DAY won two red dot Awards this year for the in-store design of the Van Gogh Museum shop here in Amsterdam (click on picture to enlarge) and a Nike Store in Paris. Both designs also won the additional honours of ‘best of the best’ and ‘distinction for high design quality’, respectively. We’ve checked out the red dot design website and if you see how many categories and awards there are, it’s hard not to win any. Having said that, we very much like what the design agency did with the Van Gogh shop. And, while we’re at it, recently Dutch interior design agency UXUS has been appointed to design the shops for the Tate Modern. That is, both for the existing Tate Modern as well as the impressive Herzog & de Meuron extension.

Epica: Kit Kat Jesus wins gold

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

kitkat-jesus

Holland won 18 Epica awards – four times gold – last week in Belgrade. It ended fifth after Germany, France, Sweden and the UK. Our favourite gold went to Kit Kat Jesus. Kit Kat pretended as if Jesus had been spotted in a Kit Kat bar and this news spread as quick as only internet can spread news. We didn’t just like it because we are atheists (or at least agnostic), but more so because we love simple (but great) ideas that generate tons of free publicity. We found it a little odd that this was in the category ‘technique’, but apparently their was no better category available – the category ‘big idea’ would have been more to the point. It was done by UbachsWisbrun/JWT. Heineken’s Walk-in fridge also won gold in ‘film’ – it was submitted by TBWA’s production company CZAR. 180 won gold for Adidas with ‘Every team needs the spark’. And Grey won gold in print for Pink Ribbon.

Source: Adformatie

Lead Lion won by Hi (KPN), Axe and Vodafone

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Yesterday we were talking about the Golden Loeki. Today we are talking about the opposite prize, the raspberry for advertising; the Lead Lion. It is awarded once a year straight after the Golden Loeki, by Dutch consumer awareness program Radar. The first prize was won by KPN’s mobile phone brand Hi. It’s about a girl that looses her ‘pokkie’ (the Surinam word for mobile phone) and goes nuts – luckily though she saved all her numbers on her Hi-account. In the commercial she screams so loud that it irritated the crap out of the consumer. According to Hi, the commercial did well among the target: 18 to 24 year olds. We believe that, but still concur with the award. An adapted Axe (Lynx) commercial, with a guy that can role his eyes to look at his own sweaty armpits, ended second. This surprised us, it is a pretty mellow ad. Maybe it was the annoying voice-over that didn’t fit with the commercial very well. The Vodafone commercial by THEY that we discussed earlier ended third. Mutated guinea pigs try to imitate normal people and talk a language that no one understands. Interesting detail; in the most recent commercial, Vodafone kept the characters, but changed the voices. So what can we learn from the Lead Lion? Don’t use loud, annoying or unintelligible voices or strange, unattractive characters in your advertising.

Heineken’s walk-in fridge wins Golden Loeki

Monday, December 21st, 2009

In the Netherlands every year the public is asked to choose the best commercial of the year. Not a bad idea, when you realize that eventually advertising is made for them. The award is called the Golden Loeki. Until 2004 ‘Loeki de Leeuw‘ (Loeki the lion) was the bumper icon of the STER, the organization selling the advertising clusters on the public channels; Netherlands 1, 2 and 3. Though officially the prize is awarded to the most ‘likeable’ commercials, it almost always goes to ads that use humour to get the message across – which says something about the average consumer, for that matter. This year the award goes to Heineken’s walk-in fridge, made by TBWA\Neboko. Indeed, a funny commercial. It was very successful this year. It already won a golden ADCN (Dutch Art Director’s Club) award. And internationally it also did well. A few weeks ago it was awarded a Silver Eurobest award and this summer a Silver Lion in Cannes. And that’s interesting. Usually there’s a big gap between what international ad pundits appreciate and what the consumer likes. Not only do the experts prefer smart, esthetical or sophisticated advertising (instead of simple jokes), Dutch humour is often culturally challenged – i.e. nobody outside the Netherlands understands it. So TBWA\Neboko made a very effective ad, it sells beer to the consumer and the agency abroad.

Philips ‘Cinema 21:9’ wins Eurobest Grand Prix

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Just like in Cannes this film by Tribal DDB won a Grand Prix in the TV/Cinema category at Eurobest in Amsterdam, last Friday. The commercial, only distributed through the internet (how could it win in TV/Cinema?), advertises the new Philips cinematic widescreen standard in a mind blowing way; a violent bank robery filmed in freeze frame and done in one single take. Cinema 21:9 also won Gold in the category Interactive – on the dedicated website you can (among other things) influence the speed and direction of the timeline of the film. The DDB network also won the best network award. At the awards ceremony, DDB asked Gary Raucher (VP Head of Integrated Marketing Communication) to accept this prize on behalf of DDB, which was a nice gesture given the fact that Philips trusted DDB with such a big budget to advertise a TV that is still in a very early stage of its product lifecycle. In general, compared to last year, the Netherlands (read: Amsterdam) did quite well. It won 22 prizes, of which 1 grand prix, 3 gold, 8 silver and 10 Bronze. Compared to the European competition, however, we didn’t. Belgium and Sweden for example – with a lot less inhabitants – scored significantly better. Amsterdam interactive agency Kong (N=5’s online agency) won Gold in the Media category for Stanislav, a short video spread through Hyves (Dutch Facebook), using your profile details to show how personal information shared on internet can easily fall in the wrong hands. Another favourite of ours, the IDFA films “You cannot make up reality” by TBWA\Neboko, won gold. ‘It’s all about the suit’ by Selmore for Van Gils won Silver in the Media category. Looking at the competition in this category, it easily deserved Gold in our opinion.

Eurobest; first day seminars

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Yesterday we visited the opening day of the Eurobest festival in Amsterdam. The first seminar we attended was given by Paul Lavoie from Taxi Europe. He talked about ‘trust’ and explained that ideas can only grow big if people give them trust – from the creative director to the client. To illustrate this, he invited a Dakar Rally driver, a female porn producer and a knife thrower. They all had to trust the people around them or the other way around. We very much liked the unconventional character of his presentation – especially the circus-like show with the knife thrower was spectacular! – and the fact that Lavoie put his ego aside to let other people talk about his subject.

After Lavoie, Jeff Kling from Wieden+Kennedy took the stage and started his talk by making sure that everybody understood he was not responsible for the slight change in the title of his talk: ‘Show me the ad, you motherfucker’. It had been changed in (…) Motherf*****. He loved the word ‘fuckin’ and used it several times to make this point.

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Eurobest jury announced

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

This year Amsterdam is hosting the Eurobest festival, so as Amsterdam Ad Blog we thought it would be appropriate to pay a little more than average attention to it. As you you’ve been able to see in the banner on our website – that has probably become a little annoying by now – the festival will be held on the 25th until the 27th of November. Yesterday the jury was announced. The following Amsterdam Creative Directors have the privilege to judge the best of Europe’s advertising: Chris Baylis, Tribal DDB (traditional); Sicco Beerda, Euro RSCG (jury president interactive); Coen Weesjes, Downtown (direct & sales promotion); Eugene Bay, VBAT (design); Andy Fackrell, 180 Amsterdam (jury president integrated) and Magnus Olsson, Saatchi & Saatchi (integrated).

Amsterdam scores well at IMC Awards

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

At the IMC Awards the Heineken ‘Trompet’ (a drum disguised as a hat for football fans, which was a follow-up of the speaker hat – a hat disguised as a speaker) by TBWA\Neboko won a golden IMC Award. Upload Cinema for De Uitkijk by Lowe/Draftfcb, also won gold. The Heineken Trompet was distributed around the European Championships 2008 as a premium – together with 8 cans of Heineken. We earlier wrote about Upload Cinema – creating long form content for a cinema, by making a compilation of long tale, short form content from the internet. All in all Amsterdam scored very well. And with 16 prizes in total, the Netherlands was the best awarded country in Europe.

Big bank theory wins Dutch design award

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Already in January we called this commercial about the Big Bank Theory by Dawn ‘state of the art storytelling’. Last weekend the beautiful animation, made by Postma Graphics and Motions, won a Dutch design award for best motion design. A good excuse to show it again.

THEY and 72andSunny are ‘small’ but great

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Bystanders always judge the advertising scene as being so vein; there’s an award for every fart being aired. Here’s another one; Advertising Age’s ‘Small agency of the year’! We have to admit that AdAge’s goal is noble: “to help uncover some of the great but not enormous agencies that too rarely get recognition, and to celebrate some of their best work, which rarely seems to make it through the big awards-show machinery”. Amsterdam based THEY became ‘international’ (= outside the US) agency of the year. The jury said that THEY “has both the small-shop creative dexterity that can transform unlikely media into ad canvas and the brand-steward chops to win big pieces of global business”. The ‘Small agency campaign of the year’ went to LA/Amsterdam-based 72andSunny for its ‘Next Level’ campaign for Nike – a fast-paced two minute commercial directed by Guy Richie, shot from the athlete’s first-person view. We wonder whether this award show is the answer to the problem at hand. If Charles Leadbeater is right in predicting that boulders will become pebbles over the next decades – meaning that the amount of small agencies will increase strongly at the expense of the big ones – the better solution is to make the international awards shows cheaper and thus more accessible. Then every fart, regardless the size of its agency, has the same chance to get awarded.