A campaign by AMV BBDO for Plastic Oceans International has won the Grand Prix and Best Multiplatform Award in the Effective Content Strategy category of this year’s WARC Awards, a global search for next-generation marketing effectiveness.

In The Trash Isles, the not-for-profit organisation put the impact of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans on the global agenda by turning a country-sized patch of trash in the Pacific into a new nation, based on the UN definition.

The campaign reached more than half a billion people, including 101 million via LADbible channels which hosted the new nation’s communications, with the greatest media exposure seen in the UK and US, followed by China. And at a UN conference, 193 countries pledged to tackle the crisis.

“It was outstanding and inspiring,” commented Namita Mediratta, Global CMI Director, Content Centre of Excellence, Unilever and chair of the judges of the Effective Content Strategy category. “They could have shown animals dying but they kept it light.”

In addition to the Grand Prix, the judges awarded four Golds, four Silvers and five Bronzes as well as two more Special Awards. The winning papers can be read in full on the WARC Awards site.

AMV BBDO also picked up a Gold and the Long-Term Idea Award for a campaign for Mars’ pet-food brand Whiskas. K.I.T. (Kat Institute of Technology), which ran in Canada, Germany, Russia and the UK, was an evolution of the brand’s earlier successful Kitten Kollege into a branded content platform covering cats of all ages in order to drive growth.

This included the use of episodic reach-driving content that incorporated simple care advice, informational videos linked to search queries and Cardboard Box 2.0 – a stress-management ‘product’ given away in stores. The campaign delivered the best business result in the digital history of Mars.

Japan’s I&SBBDO Group and KOO-KI won a Gold and the Smart Spender Award with a campaign for Hiroshima Tourism that set out to raise awareness and consumption of local oysters. This was based around a widespread inability to write the word oyster in kanji, the original Japanese writing system.

A school workbook was dedicated to oysters, branded content that not only aided children in writing the word in kanji but also in learning about the food and influencing parents. This was picked up by hundreds of media outlets which helped turn an investment of US$100,000, into US$10m of additional value for the oyster trade.

Sourced from WARC