June's always a busy time for ad events, and this year's no exception, with the North American Effies already announced and the Cannes Lions beginning on Sunday. But last week it was the turn of the New York Festivals' International Advertising Awards, held in Shanghai, China.
At the event, Young & Rubicam and Jung von Matt, Hamburg won Agency Network and Agency of the Year respectively - after winning the highest number of individual gold, silver and bronze medals. All in all, Y&R picked up nine golds, 13 silvers and 15 bronzes, along with 53 Finalist Certificates. For its prize, Jung von Matt won ten Gold World Medals, seven silver, ten bronze and 19 Finalist Certificates.
Seperately, the International Advertising Awards jury also selected Grand Trophy Award winners from gold-winning individual campaigns. These included Farfar's development of the 'World's Biggest Signpost' for Nokia, which featured a giant arrow emblazoned with an LED screen hoisted 50 metres above a prime spot in central London.
Good Things, a location-based feature of the client's Ovi Maps service, was leveraged for the campaign: users submitted their favourite shop or restaurant, and Nokia automatically rotated the signpost to point the way to selected entries, displaying the distance to each location on the screen.
More info on the Nokia blog, from which the above picture was sourced.
Unsurprisingly, agency of the year Jung von Matt also won a Grand Trophy Award, picking up the prize in the digital and interactive category for its work with client 13th Street, which included what's touted as the world's first interactive theatrical commercial.
Thanks to voice recognition technology, a selected cinema-goer could use their mobile phone to communicate with one of the film's protagonists in real-time. Answering either-or questions allowed them to have a say in how the film progressed.
Elsewhere, the Golden Hammer awards, have also been handed out in Riga, Latvia. All in all, diplomas were given to 63 entries in the creative category, including seven gold awards.
The top-scoring campaign in this category, the Creativity Case, went to Ogilvy & Mather Romania. Leo Burnett Russia won the media category, while Ukraine's Kinograf topped the charts for digital media. Ogilvy & Mather Romania also took the grand prix for 'The Big Turn Off', which was also a gold winner in the social category.
Defying the economic downturn, the total number of entries - the majority from Russian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian agencies - actually grew by 30% from last year.
Staying in eastern Europe, the Grand Effie at the Romanian Effies has gone to 'The Story Goes On', from agency GMP Advertising for client Timisoreana. As its title suggests, the campaign presented the Romanian beer as something of a heritage brand, with this commercial featuring a barrel journeying into the (highly picturesque) past.
In the US, the Webby Awards - honouring online innovation - were held in New York earlier this week. Reflecting the general digital trend towards immediacy and away from the long-form, 2010's acceptance speeches were limited to five words only.
Predictably enough, this resulted in the actual content of the speeches ranging from the banal ("Internet is a cool thing"- Chatroulette founder and winner of the Breakout of the Year award Andrey Ternovskiy, who has a bit more to say for himself in this recent New Yorker profile), to the incomprehensible ("Humanity. Colonization. Phobos. Monolith. Mars!" - astronaut Buzz Aldrin, picking up the Best Government site prize on behalf of NASA). Perhaps because he's more accustomed to keeping his messages brief, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's speech was the most pellucid of the night: "Every character counts. Thank you."
A full archive of speeches is viewable here. For a full list of upcoming awards dates for your diary, be sure to check out our Warc Awards Calendar.
