Judging

So it's been three months since the last post. I've been caught between not having anything interesting to say and being crazy at work. It's been a time characterized by doing more than thinking, and looking more internally than externally.

But I feel recharged, inspired and very much humbled after spending a week judging the world's best work at this year's Clio Awards.  I was lucky enough to be invited by Faris to sit on the jury judging the integrated and content and contact categories.  To me, these are two of the most important categories that help tell us where advertising might be headed.  I can't, for obvious reasons, go in to specifics as the results need to remain secret until the award ceremony on May 19th.  But I think I can talk about some general observations.  In fact, here's some video:

Integrated, unsurprisingly, showed how diverse this concept is nowadays.  We saw stuff that ranged from classic execute the same idea across different media to brands that did something and then used media to tell more people about it to work that was more transmedia in nature.

C&C was perhaps the most fun to judge.  As one of our jurors, Rahul Sabnis, brilliant put it it's essentially the incubator category.  It's the stuff that seems to be at the front of the communications train showing us a new direction for the industry and as a result was hugely diverse in nature.  There was a lot of great use of technology but I think the work that stood out tended to have an incredibly simple ideas at its heart.  A simple thing that elegantly removed the barriers between what people currently do and what you want them to do.  I'll talk a bit more about this in a later post.

Of course, no award show roundup would be complete without the cliches you pick up after watching 400+ videos over 5 days.  And, in no particular order, are this year's:

QR codes.  Tattoos.  Town names that are puns or that are changed.  No media spend.  And then make sure you take it to the streets.

Thanks to everyone who entered work - contrary to my thoughts going in to the week, there was some brilliant work produced.  Thanks to Dan, Karl, Lisa and the rest of the Clio crew for making the week so easy and fun.  And thanks to all the judges - Faris, Jay Benjamin, Brett Craig, Amber Finlay, Guido Heffels, Jason Oke, Rahul Sabnis and Mark Taylor - for making me so much smarter during the debates we had over the work.  It's amazing how much you can learn when you are the dumbest person in the room.

Comments

[@rahulsabnis]

Oddly, on the way back, I read the Vogue @anngelica had purchased and noticed how many fashion ads had QR codes. Firmly 40% of the inserts had the marketing "tramp stamp" of today.

While I'm quite certain very few peeps are scanning the codes, it made me wonder that if enough brands just do something, will they create a need...kinda like our little WWW.

Looking forward to the next round!

Yours
/rs

(aka: THE dumbest member of our little tribe)

[Dino]

I have no idea what C&C stands for? Do you mean like the C&C Music Factory?

[Gareth]

Not quite as cool - content and contact. the stuff you do in work hours!

[@pedrosorren]

Thanks for this great post.

Simple and effective is the hardest but best place to be. I feel like I always start complicating too much, but is the refinement process that brings this simplicity. First start doing a mess and then you organize it.

How do you reach simplicity?

I look forward for your presentation at @bdwcu next week!

@pedrosorren