The Directory Big Won creative rankings 2010

And the winner is…a staircase

Ten years ago, if someone had told me that the most garlanded campaigns of 2010 would include a signpost, a telephone box and a staircase I would have thought they were on drugs. But that’s what has happened. The No.1 campaign in The Directory Big Won creative rankings across all media is Farfar’s ‘World’s Biggest Signpost’ for Nokia. 4^th equal is Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘Teletransporter’ for Andes beer, a kiosk placed in bars, which allowed drinkers to ring wives and girlfriends and pretend they were at the hospital, in a traffic jam, any excuse. Also 4^th equal is DDB Stockholm’s ‘Fun Theory’ for Volkswagen, one part of which was a musical staircase. As you walked up it, each step played a note. Looking elsewhere in the Top 20, we have : ° A large box, BBDO’s ‘Cube’ installation for HBO which showed simultaneously four movies, the four different sides to a story. ° A parcel, but with a face printed on it. Ogilvy Brazil’s idea was an app that took a photo of everyone who popped into Burger King and printed their mugshot onto the wrapper of their Whopper. ° A song, which got to No.4 in the charts for Shalmor Avnon Amichay Y&R Tel Aviv on behalf of Israel’s AIDS Task Force. . ° A practical joke from JWT Italy for Heineken when they suckered a large group of football fans into missing the big Milan v Real Madrid game to go to a classical concert with their girlfriends. ° A game from DDB London which helped make Monopoly contemporary, relevant and fun. ° A perfume from Clemenger BBDO Melbourne which went on sale across Australia, raising money for guide dogs for then blind. You want more proof that advertising has changed? Of the Top 20 campaigns across all media, only five are what you might call ‘traditional’, in as much as they have a TV component to them: ° No.3 – TBWA\Chiat Day’s ‘Replay’ campaign for Gatorade. ° No.7 – BETC Euro RSCG Paris’s commercial for Canal+, ‘The Closet’. ° No. 15, ‘Sandwich’ from Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO for Walkers Crisps. ° No. 17, ‘Nothing Soft Gets In’ from Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney for Toyota. ° No. 20, Special Group’s ‘Orcon + Iggy Together’ for Orcon broadband. Oh, and I suppose TBWA Paris’s ‘Graffiti’ viral for Aides France though I don’t believe it had any paid-for media to support it. Not a single press campaign or poster.

Brand activation, everyone’s at it

Ten years ago, the sort of work that’s wowing juries around the world now was called brand activation and it was created by small agencies with clever-clever names like Cunning Stunts, SWOT, Immerse and Antidote. Today brand activation is being created by agencies with names like BBDO, DDB, TBWA and Abbott Mead Vickers. That said, looking at the top 20 Direct campaigns, independent agencies do feature more heavily than in other categories with no fewer than eight listings: ° Farfar, Stockholm, at No.1 with ‘Signpost’ ° Serviceplan, Munich, at No.4 with Bang & Olufsen’s ‘Audio Annual Report’ ° Special Group, Auckland, at No.6 with ‘Orcon + Iggy’ ° Droga5 with ‘4320 LA/SYD’ for Virgin Australia ° Shackleton, Madrid, with ‘Capable’ for the ONCE Foundation ° Ester, Stockholm, with ‘1000 Condoms’ for Stockholm City Council ° Mortierbrigade, Brussels, with ‘Eternal Moonwalk’ for radio station Studio Brussels. ° Happiness Brussels at No. 20 with ‘IQ Font’ for Toyota. So, the headline news is that the more creative of the multinational agencies have ‘got it’, as they say. Perhaps the most shocking example of how well they’ve ‘got it’ was when Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO won the Direct Agency of the Year laurels at Cannes 2010. In The Directory Big Won rankings for Direct, AMV is the No.4= agency in the world with the No.2 campaign, ‘Sandwich’. ‘Choose a Different Ending’ for the Metropolitan Police was also a multiple winner at international shows. 10 of the Top 20 Direct agencies are ad agencies and only five are specialists in direct: Shackleton Madrid, di Paola & Asociados Argentina, Proximity Portugal, RMG Target Dublin, and CP Proximity Spain. Does that tell us anything? Only that the gap between the different kinds of agency is narrowing. And that life will continue to be painful for the likes of Proximity, RMG and OgilvyOne, where they still exist, as their parent agencies steadily continue to annexe their clients, their work and their income. Wunderman alone seems to have escaped the predators, who must surely be eyeing them greedily from within Y&R. This isn’t to say that direct marketing agencies are doomed. Far from it. But they will probably remain small and their focus will be data and customer relationships rather than mass-marketing. Of course, there’s been a lot of comment about how trad agencies are muscling in on the direct territory. “Get off our awards,’ bleated one blogger. But Guy Bradbury, creative director of Touch DDB in London, told Directory “It’s bloody great that agencies like Abbott Mead Vickers and Y&R Tel Aviv are doing outstanding direct work because it raises the bar creatively for us all. And it shows clients what the rest of us could be doing for them if they gave us the chance.”.

Top agencies in Direct

Looking specifically at Direct, in 2010 the team analysed 1,253 award-winning campaigns from 609 agencies. Shackleton and Ogilvy Frankfurt were early adopters of integration and both have, for the past five years, produced consistently outstanding work in the Direct category, Shackleton perhaps having a greater digital expertise. Of the three top agencies, Ogilvy Frankfurt won awards with no fewer than 20 different ideas and Shackleton with 13. But BMF Sydney trumped them both with 48 awards for 28 different ideas – and is as capable of skillfully targeted direct mail campaigns as it is of creating web-based brand-response campaigns. Their ‘6 Beers of Separation’ for Tooheys was, I believe, much better than the 27^th placing it got in the Top Direct Campaigns. If it had got Gold, or even Silver at Cannes or a couple of the international events, they would have made it to top of the heap. By contrast, Abbott Mead Vickers got to 4^th = thanks to just two campaigns (‘Sandwich’ for Walkers and ‘Choose a Different Ending’ for the Metropolitan Police) and it’s the same story for Ogilvy Sao Paulo, who won big with three ideas: 1. ‘Whopper Face’ idea Burger King 2. ‘The $73,000 Bar Tab’ campaign for Bar Aurelia 3. GRAAC ‘Donate your Website’. Elsewhere in the list, Memac Ogilvy Dubai gained a Top 10 position thanks to an exceptional performance in regional shows, with ‘Dustvertising’ for Castrol and campaigns for Volvo, The Economist and a clever little idea using their own business cards to sell themselves. If it is the brand-response campaigns with a significant video component that tend to win well at the big international awards (only one piece of direct mail won Gold at Cannes in 2010, for instance) good old-fashioned DM hasn’t been completely superseded.

A few winners with Mail a component

Three campaigns using mail are in the Top 10 Campaigns list, hurrah! They are: ° Serviceplan’s ‘Annual Report’ for Bang & Olufsen at No.5, when they mailed out the company’s 2009 figures on CD, sung by top opera singers. ° CP Proximity Spain’s ‘Composing Your Life’ idea for Audi at No. 11, driving recipients online where their personal details could create a unique melody. ° Shackleton Madrid’s ‘Capable’ campaign for the ONCE Foundation. CEO’s were mailed a blindfold and invited to try running their companies wearing it. For more rankings, please go to www.thebigwon.com or for specific queries, email [email protected].

The Top 10 DIRECT agencies in the world 2010

The Top 20 DIRECT campaigns in the world 2010

Top 10 Digital campaigns in the world 2010

Top talent

The Directory Big Won rankings have been sponsored by The Garden Partnership in London, run by Alison Tindall and Mark Rapley, both of whom came out of DDB London (and its previous incarnation, BMP). If you want to know your creative ranking in 2010, email [email protected]. Also, get in touch with her if you are looking to hire top creative talent or if you’re top creative talent looking to be hired. One depressing aspect to the lists is there’s just one woman’s name in the Top Creative Directors rankings , one in the Best Copywriter list and one in the Best Art Directors.

Top Direct Creative Directors 2010

Top copywriters

Top art directors

Factoids

In 2010 The Directory team logged 5,619 awards won for 2,820 clients by 331 Chief Creative Officers 698 Executive Creative Directors 2,178 Creative Directors 2,465 copywriters