Guest Times: Lost and found – Award winning ads!

Vandana Sethi, Director, Water Brand Consulting, takes a dig at the rush to win ad awards

April 3, 2013

Vandana Sethi

An average person goes through at least two or three newspapers in the morning before he or she gets to plonk on the office chair. Even during the day a fair number of tabloids and magazines float around the office trying to nudge the social media friendly denizens of today with some sense of the printed word power; to what effect we are yet to quantify. On another dimension, the PC and the laptop and the tablet and the telly are vying for attention over the voice of FM and cell decibels.

In this media clutter that we survive in, it was quite funny that the search engine had to go full throttle trying to locate award winning ads. Why don't they appear in mainline media anymore or are they too mustachioed to be seen clean-shaven in a city haze? Makes one wonder and that's a good sign for an advertising, sorry, mid-sized advertising person to wonder.

When was the last time the big guns stuck to a brief like glue without having to go shooting in Rajasthan, South Africa or Australia? That spawned an idea: we have a guy from remote North-East in the office; why don't we shoot some slice of life (wild) there and come and paste it on to any of our clients' products. We could release it in the Dongmusa and send it for an award nomination. Hmm…Let's Facebook this idea.

While cooling off with some award winning beverages that were unfortunately not the result of award winning ads, we came upon a fizzy idea. Adding sauce was our South Indian accountant who loved stereotype in Helvetica Bold. Why don't we dedicate a whole team to Google the blazes out of the cyber world to come out with some stutter shocking plagiarized original idea of how to ...let's see…. What brands do we have? Oh well we will make up a product. We need to get an award, man!

The day went by quite breezily, we found 1,342 and a half award winning campaigns on the tube. We had dedicated a team to come up with ideas based on their findings. We will hire award winning creative guys if necessary to execute the work. Done. We have to win awards next year!

And yes! It does not matter if our multi-media campaign goes over the head or gets lost in the folds of the dhoti of the TG; it has to hit the guys in ivory towers and fancy cubicles. Full points awarded for that. Period!

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