The DEA Awards - recognising the best in UK design - were announced yesterday evening in London. And it was Waitrose's essential range - a low-cost line for a high-end British supermarket chain - that scooped the top prize. This continues an impressive run for the campaign, which also won Gold at last year's IPA Effectiveness Awards. Both of these case studies are now available to warc.com subscribers - as is a further essential Waitrose case study from Admap, which spotted the campaign's potential back in April 2010.
But this weekend, attention will turn to iris' Urgent Genius competition. This new ad award is based around small teams producing topical work at short notice; "newsjacking", as those in the know are calling it, involves brands putting out marketing messages that build buzz off the back of news events.
According to iris, the ideal newsjacked campaign would "be seeded within 12 to 48 hours of the news story landing in your RSS reader". With this in mind, the first round of the competition lasts just two days, with briefs going out at iris' offices in London at 7pm today and the deadline falling at 7pm on Sunday (February 20th). Urgent Genius will involve 100 teams, including professionals from Google, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Wieden & Kennedy, Fallon and Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
With the strongest campaigns having been selected by a panel of judges after the first round closes, the social web takes over: the overall winners of the competition will be those generating the biggest online buzz, whether through number of video views, Facebook "likes" or other social media metrics. To take away the risk of large agencies with big seeding networks shutting their smaller rivals out, these results will then be fed through iris' so-called "Urgent Genius Power Rule", which will establish who managed to generate the biggest buzz relative to their size.
Assuming you're not following them already, you can see how the weekend's going on Iris Worldwide's Twitter feed. Warc subscribers can also browse this year's DEA winners - and, of course, anyone needing some more awards dates for their diary can check out Warc's Global Awards Calendar.
