33^rd Caples Awards Finalists

For the 33^rd year, creative directors from top agencies convened in New York to judge this year’s John Caples International Awards entries. Nearly 70 judges from around the world scrutinized more than 800 entries across 29 categories for two days in November.

Direct Marketing News is in its third year of working with the Caples organization. The process culminates with an annual awards show in New York in March, recognizing top direct marketing creative work and agency teams.

The judging process differentiates Caples from other industry awards shows in that only senior-level creative professionals take part in judging. The awards recognize the most creative solutions to challenging marketing problems, as well as the minds behind those big ideas.

Direct marketing pioneer Andi Emerson founded the awards in honor of the legendary copywriter, and they have evolved considerably in the 33 years since the event was first held as a luncheon, attended by just a handful of creatives.

This year’s judging held the inaugural Creative Forum, a group discussion addressing the evolving role of creativity and technology in direct. Such a collection of expertise in one room is a novelty all judges can appreciate, and something that keeps many of them returning each year.

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Mapquest, Yelp and IAC’s CityGrid are among the companies offering small businesses a $99/month offer to have news, promotions and pictures featured beside company names within across the network of sites.  

The opportunity for ramped-up listings is an effort to gain local-listing marketshare in the wake of Google’s recent $25/month offer allowing small businesses to have similar additional content appear beside their search and map listing on Google search results pages.

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The report, called, “Lead-To-Revenue Management Transforms Tech Marketing,” said that having a marketing department bridge the gap between engineering and sales, the two pillars of any tech company, could aid both customer service and revenue throughout a customer’s life cycle, the report said. Forrester recommends that technology marketers realign so that marketing departments accountable for revenue rather than just lead generation, as is often the case.

Revenue, not leads, are the end goal for any CEO, according to the report. Marketing and sales teams must work together to generate revenue and reduce sales and marketing expense. That means the traditional lead generation focus, which emphasizes activity rather than outcome, won’t be sufficient. Forrester recommends a lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) model and approach that defines processes, goals, and service-level commitments spanning the entire marketing-through-sales process.” That approach will also demonstrate marketing’s contribution to repeatable and predictable revenue, the report said.

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The Data: No data is collected as part of the campaign, but users wishing to purchase one of the original poster designs are directed from Facebook to the Jack Daniel’s e-commerce site, where they can create an account and purchase various branded products.?

The Channel: The campaign, which launched June 27, also features a television commercial, titled “As American As,” presenting Jack Daniel’s as an iconic American brand embodying an independent spirit. Print ads ran in USA Today and The New York Times on July 1 and July 3, respectively. Out-of-home ads ran for eight weeks in 18 US cities. Within the Facebook app, slated to run indefinitely, users can make a customized toast to friends in addition to designing posters and watching ?the short movie. ?

The Creative: Posters all feature the Jack Daniel’s signature black background with bold white typeface; some have red and blue highlights. Both the making-of video and the TV spot highlight the hand-crafted spirit of Jack Daniel’s. ?

Verdict:

?Dylan Taylor is executive creative director of BMF. Taylor was the first Australian to be awarded   the Irving Wunderman Award for lifetime achievement at the John Caples International Awards in 2008. He is on the Caples executive committee.

I really want to like this work. The posters are just so achingly beautiful they made a film about them and put it on Facebook with quite a neat personalization and pass-on interface. However, it is boring. Any humor has been stripped out of it. I wouldn’t mind some of the fun in alcohol advertising being, well, fun.?

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The Data: Visitors who agree to install the app allow the company to access their basic profile information through Facebook and post updates to their news feeds on the social network.?

The Channel: The game exists only on Facebook, but viewers can view the trailer online. Coupons must be printed out and presented upon point-of-sale. A TV commercial shows a robot returning from work unable to eat its Carl’s Jr. chicken sandwich, after which the campaign tagline appears: “Machines can’t eat it. Machines shouldn’t make it.”?

The Creative: Developed by Los Angeles-based creative agency 72andSunny, the humorous campaign highlights Carl’s Jr.’s hand-breaded chicken, made without ?assistance from machines or robots of any sort. Bikini-clad models help the player hurl chicken sandwiches using a bikini catapult, The Slingkini, to defeat an onslaught of invading robots.?

Verdict:

Dylan Taylor is executive creative director of BMF. Taylor was the first Australian to be awarded the Irving Wunderman Award for lifetime achievement at the John Caples International Awards in 2008. He is on the Caples executive committee.

Is it involving? Tick. Does it appeal to a younger target market? Tick. Does it reward you at the end with a prize? Tick. Is it the most involving game I’ve played on the Net? No. I think it does the job, but with only 6,000 taking it up so far, it thus far looks very limited in its success.?

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The Data: Comcast is collecting consumer data as part of “The Search for the World Championship Baby” contest, which is part of a larger mass-media campaign called “Help the Giants Win,” both of which launched July 12. ?

The Channel: The “Help the Giants Win” initiative lives on TV and online at a microsite. It urges visitors to tweet what they did last year that could have helped the Giants win. ?

The Creative: Led by BBDO San Francisco, the “Help the Giants Win” campaign includes TV ?commercials showing fictional fans superstitiously recreating events exactly as they happened a year ago in an effort to help the team repeat as champions, while the “World Championship Baby” microsite allows users to upload a photo of both themselves.?

Verdict:

Dylan Taylor is executive creative director of BMF. Taylor was the first Australian to be awarded the Irving Wunderman Award for lifetime achievement at the John Caples International Awards in 2008. He is on the Caples executive committee.

This reminds me of a promotion for Dodge in Belgium two years ago, in which anyone who made a baby on the test drive was eligible to keep the car. There I can see the tie-in. There is fan data collection here, but the offer is not clear from the commercial. ?

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The Data: To enter, visitors submit basic personal information, write 200 words about their experience with Honda and provide a YouTube link or image of themselves using the product. Entrants can choose to receive email and newsletters from the company, as well as direct mail and telephone marketing messages.?

The Channel: The first mini-documentary to air Channel 4, about an alpaca breeder in Oxfordshire who uses a Honda ATV to herd her flock, debuted in June, while the latest, “Night Fishing,” about a fisherman whose boat features twin Honda engines, aired in July. Both currently live on the microsite. ?

The Creative: Documentaries focus on the unique lifestyles of the subjects rather than on the Honda ?products themselves. Each “day-in-the-life” feature portrays Honda as enabling the subject to carry on his way of life more securely and conveniently.?

Verdict:

Dylan Taylor is executive creative director of BMF. Taylor was the first Australian to be awarded the Irving Wunderman Award for lifetime achievement at the John Caples International Awards in 2008. He is on the Caples executive committee.

Honda has created some of the most beautiful work around the world in recent years. These films are beautifully shot and the narrative gently guides you through the story, with the “Oh, I get it” moment as the product is featured at the end. It’s simple, engaging, true-to-life work, and I hope it gains traction and drives engagement. Nice, simple and credible.?

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The Data: The outdoor campaign has no data-collection element, but the call-to-action drives users to the site, where visitors can purchase the band’s album or interact with various types of content, including album sample tracks, video footage and blog updates about the band’s whereabouts.?

The Channel: Each 3-D poster was mounted on a solid board and hung throughout the city of London, forcing pedestrians on the sidewalk to take notice of the oversized horse heads. The equestrian theme reflects the cover art for the band’s latest album. ?

The Creative: The paper-craft horse torsos were built using Google SketchUp, a 3-D imaging tool, and then ?assembled by hand. Each poster took 35 hours to construct. Foam, a London-based creative advertising agency founded by Sony Music Entertainment’s Steve Milbourne and Phil Clandillon, which is part of Sony, handled ?the creative. ?

Verdict:

Dylan Taylor is executive creative director of BMF. Taylor was the first Australian to be awarded the Irving Wunderman Award for lifetime achievement at the John Caples International Awards in 2008. He is on the Caples executive committee.

Unless you are die-hard fan, you might think you are being directed to a cardboard engineer’s blog. Visitors can become Facebook fans or receive emails, but what next? The channel is “obscure ambient.” I thought this YouTube comment — “I wonder how long till [someone] comes and vandalizes the beautiful piece of art” — summed it up, unfortunately. All in all, a bit too niche and obscure.?

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Q: Are international markets getting more similar to one another as digital media makes global reach easier? ?

A: It depends. Some major advertisers are running global work in a lot of similar-viewpoint markets. The most intelligent of them are personalizing and localizing those campaigns. There may be a global line, but it has local effects, and those are usually more successful. If you’re just transposing ads from one area to another, they’re not really talking to the audience. Digital does afford us the ability to personalize and localize, so everyone should embrace it. ?

Q: Do daily deals complicate or enhance local efforts??

A: Daily deals and group buying are both good ideas, but I wonder if there will be a backlash. I went to a restaurant the other day and there was a separate queue for group deal buyers because the restaurant got slammed with them. There’s a race to the bottom of prices, and everyone is looking for the best deals for the more functional items so they can spend more money on discretionary items. The middle is being hollowed out and worlds are becoming more extreme. Utility items are cheaper and discretionary items are getting more expensive, so it’s an interesting time to be a marketer.?

Q: Is it tougher to market between every day and luxury items??

A: It depends how you portray the value message. The smarter marketers are talking about how useful or valuable a product or service is to negate the need for price discounts. If retailers can’t discount, they have to up their level of customer service, which we’re seeing in Australia.?

Q: Where does Australia see itself compared to other regions in technology adoption??

A: A lot of direct work at the Cannes Lions International Festival of ?Creativity had a mobile solution attached, and while Australia is a big adopter of new technologies like mobile, the networks aren’t great. ?The actual use of mobile for marketing in Australia is limited by a bandwidth issue. We’re slow in uptake of mobile compared to online ads and email, which were all rapidly adopted. ?

Q: Are markets like Korea and Japan the future of direct??

A: I think with mobile and tablets, we’ll all always be on, and marketers need to be delivering value and service wherever we are. ?

Q: In your experience judging creative awards, does work from particular regions have a consistent, almost predictable look and feel from year to year??

A: Sometimes there’s a mimicry that goes on in advertising and we push to fight that. Each country has its own tone, look and feel. In terms of judging, many campaigns around the world benefit from good PR undertaken by the agencies, and judges often feel obliged to give a piece of work gold in one show if it won gold in another. On the other hand, it’s always exciting to see fresh work and discover that new wave of work from any area.

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The first phase of the campaign, which still lives at www.jellopuddingface.com, aggregated in real time the number of smiles and frowns posted to the Twittersphere, and sought to turn the frowns upside down through pudding giveaways if negative sentiment outnumbered positive.

Similarly, the digital billboard shows the percentage of smiles vs. frowns and adjusts the floating head’s facial expression accordingly.

The campaign is handled by Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, which just rolled out a similar digital outdoor campaign as part of Domino’s “Raising the Bar” campaign, in which customer feedback scrolls across a Times Square billboard in real time.

Though there is less risk to the brand itself than the Domino’s outdoor campaign since the Jell-O Pudding campaign does not display or even aggregate tweets about itself, it’s great to see innovative digital out-of-home advertisng integrated with social media as part of top brands’ integrated campaigns. These two, in addition to McDonald’s Pick ‘n’ Play campaign in Sweden and Fox’s Blue Bloods campaign in Spain, are raising the bar for outdoor advertising and it will be great to see what’s next in the channel’s pipeline.

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