Wieden + Kennedy achieves ‘holy grail’ of ultimate awesomeness. Twice.
The Gunn Report has published a piece on those campaigns which won the highest accolades for both creativity and effectiveness last year: The 2012 Cases for Creativity. Here's an extract:
Sometime in the not too distant past, as researchers around the world
proved unanimously that highly creative content is much more likely to drive
greater commercial success, the argument over whether advertising should strive
first to be ‘creative’ or ‘effective’ was replaced with a simple ambition to be
both.
Today it’s clients as much as creatives who aspire to do the most
creative work that in turn leads to the most outstanding commercial results.
And the Holy Grail for client and agency partnerships has increasingly become
to win a gold Lion and a gold Effie with the same campaign.
…Winning a gold award at either Cannes or
the Effies is bloody difficult. Of the hundreds of thousands of campaigns
produced around the world this year past, 141 were creative enough to win a
Gold Lion and 300 were effective enough to win a Gold Effie. These winners
represent the tiniest fraction of a percentage point of our industry’s work.
And winning both – taking home a Gold Lion and a Gold Effie for the same
campaign – is a delicious rarity. A high watermark of human achievement in creative
communications, and the kind of work we’d all love to be able to stake our
names to.
Nine campaigns joined this exclusive club in 2012… These are all cases for creativity.
Persuasive appeals to drive outstanding commercial success by producing work
that’s highly original, hugely engaging and brilliantly executed. To do things
that consumers and the media find fascinating enough to talk about. And most of
all, to quote Faris Yakob from his recent commentary in Millward Brown’s 2012
Effie Report, to “be awesome”. Because “in a world driven by sharing, if it
doesn’t spread it’s dead, and awesomeness, the emotion of awe, is what drives
the most spread.”
Of 2012's nine in total, here are the two "awesome" campaigns from Wieden + Kennedy: gold Cannes Lion-winning campaigns that went on to pick up a gold Effie.
Chrysler
'Born of Fire'
"A
repositioning argument of classical proportions, 'Imported from Detroit' turned
a city's hard times into glory, making Chrysler synonymous with the American
spirit and driving a sales comeback that enabled the carmaker to pay off their
government bailout six years early. The campaign won gold at both the Film and
Film Craft Lions in 2011 and took out the Grand North American Effie in 2012."
Nike
'Write the Future'
"Albeit
the most impressive aspect of the campaign, the dizzyingly epic 'Write the
Future' film was just one part of a giant global effort to steal adidas'
football World Cup thunder. Despite not paying a cent in sponsorship money,
Nike had 'the biggest and most successful World Cup in our history' according
to CEO Mark Parker, winning gold at the 2011 Integrated, Cyber and Film Craft
Lions in addition to the Film Grand Prix, and taking out the 2012 Global
Effies' only gold."