An integrated campaign took the third grand prix on Saturday at the Goafest 2012. Not many would have seen the Creativeland Asia’s 3D experience for Audi’s A8L. Yet, it made it to the hallowed list after what was a fierce debate by the jury members. But, it was Ogilvy India, with 50 metals, that pulled off a convincing show as the overall winner in the tally. It nailed 11 golds, and one grand prix (Friday’s grand prix in creative for its online integrated campaign under digital and mobile).
Taproot, the underdog tipped to challenge Ogilvy’s winning streak, sank its teeth into six golds, the second-highest number. However, it trailed Leo Burnett (35) by one metal in the overall tally for the runner-up spot. DDB Mudra bagged 32, two of those golds.
The creative awards (as opposed to the media awards) saw a total of 332 metals. It went up from 224 given out last year. Against one grand prix last year, there were three in all, with the media grand prix debuting this year.
The organisers, AAAI and Ad Club Bombay, seem to be in no mood to bring back the ‘Agency of the Year’ award they had discontinued five years back. By officially assigning weights to the three kinds of metals given away – gold, silver and bronze – they used to anoint the best agency and ranked the rest. Shashi Sinha, the president of Ad Club Bombay and the chairman of Awards Governing Council (and CEO, Lodestar) points out: “There isn’t one winner, there are 61 of them. The Abbies are about democratisation and not a race to the top by two or three agencies.” There were 61 organisations (agencies, design houses, direct marketing companies, clients) that walked away with one or the other metal (compared with 45 last year).
Siddharth Behal, director of risk consulting for KPMG, who led the process of selection, right down to tabulating data, points out: “Last year, it was about putting in the processes for winner selection, this year it is about reaping the benefits in terms of the quality of selection.” Done in two stages, the first round is of entries being filtered by the rule of securing three votes to qualify to the next round. In the next round, one has to secure 50 per cent voting to keep graduating to subsequent levels – finalists, metal qualification, bronze, silver, gold — after heated debates. For the grand prix, a gold is a pre-requisite.
With each piece of advertising, rather than an entire campaign being the mode of entry for the awards, it was up to the juries to decide on which entries of a campaign need to be clubbed and recognised and which ones stood the ground alone.
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Ajay Chandwani, director, Percept, and chairman and member of the award governing council, says: "It depends on whether there are different ideas, even if part of the same campaign, or the same idea presented with just a different presentation." So, Ogilvy's ads for Cadbury Dairy Milk got clubbed and notched a bronze, while Taproot's different takes on its 'Har Friend Zaroori Hai' (HFZ) for Airtel saw three different entries corner a gold and two silvers in TV advertising (film).
However, the most animated discussion surrounded the grand prix award for integrated campaigns (unlike single entries for most categories, in this category audio-visual entries about advertisement content in more than one media are sent in).
According to a person close to the development, the jury had a tough call to make. On the one hand, there were Taproot's two very popular campaigns - HFZ (Airtel) and 'Change the Game' (Pepsi) - while on the other was the upscale, but impressive, Audi A8L 3D campaign. "The voting proved that the jury leaned towards the rarer campaign by Creativeland Asia. It was a close call, but while the other two were crowd-favourites, they had a tougher job for Audi. Doing a brilliant integrated campaign for a product with a sharp and narrow audience is a shade more challenging than creating one for a mass category," he adds.
Other popular TV campaigns that also got recognised were Leo Burnett's "Koi Bhi Inssan Chota Nai Hota" for Kaun Banega Crorepati, and DDB Mudra's Volkswagen Jetta campaign. In integrated campaigns, JWT India received bronzes for two of its campaigns, one of them being the Bleed Blue campaign for Nike Cricket.