Colenso BBDO’s Spikes Radio Grand Prix for Mars Pedigree K9FM was a special achievement, but the agency’s haul of three Golds in just one category – the most important one, reckons MD Nick Garrett – has really got everyone at College Hill excited.
In all, five Creative Effectiveness Awards (1 x Grand Prix and 4 x Spikes) were given out and Colenso picked up three of them.
“Our rationale behind entering so much work in the Creative Effectiveness is that this category is about great work that works,” Garrett said. “The campaigns have to have won a Spike or been shortlisted the year before; in other words, they have been deemed to be powerfully creative by our industry peers.
“Once that filter has been applied it’s the most efficient work of all the creative work – which is the biggest compliment you can have. It’s arguably the most important category in the whole of the Spikes and/or Cannes because it’s the best work in the world that is proven to work.
“If you’ve won lots of Spikes or Cannes Lions and you haven’t entered Creative Effectiveness it probably means that that work hasn’t worked, although it may be very creatively interesting.
“So when we had four of campaigns all do well last year at the Spikes – Amnesty International Trial by Timeline, V Motion Project, Mountain Dew’s Beyond the Wall and Samsung’s Online Line – that’ve also been successful in the effectiveness awards around the world we thought it would be sensible to enter into Creative Effectiveness.
And out of a region of 3.3 billion people there are only five campaigns that were awarded; four of them got Spikes, one got a Grand Prix and three of them were ours. That’s not bad for all the agencies in Asia / Pacific that 60% of all the Creative Effectiveness Spikes went to New Zealand and they all went to Colenso BBDO. An Effectiveness Spike is the equivalent of a Gold Spike.
Garrett says he did not expect such a result. “Obviously we were confident about the work and believed in the quality of the creating thinking and the results – otherwise we wouldn’t have entered it.
“When we saw the shortlist and realised four of our ideas were in the last 10, I guess it gives you some confidence that you might be lucky and get one to two up. But no, we didn’t in our wildest imagination think that we’d get three.
“Credit to our clients who bought big powerful brave work that was highly effective, and that’s what we’re all in this industry to do.”
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