One of the four Grand Prix winners at this year’s Loerie Awards was Lowe Bull’s print campaign for Independent Newspapers which, though chillingly effective, is based on nothing conceptually more spectacular than the good old ‘before and after” chestnut. An unsuspecting Japanese family in Hiroshima on August 5 1945, enjoy an intimate moment the day before you-know-what; an unsuspecting JFK plays with his children in the Oval Office on September 21 1963, the day before you-know-what; unsuspecting Soweto children walk to school on June 15 1976, the day before you-know-what; and a group of unsuspecting kids plays soccer in a park at the base of the World Trade Centre in New York on September 10 2001, the day before you-know-what.
The images all evoke that final moment of innocent idyll before order is consumed by chaos. On that score, the campaign could very well have included an image of a calm, quiet seaside holiday resort town on the East Coast of South Africa with the caption ‘Margate, Friday July 27 2007”. For the day after that the subtropical tranquility is resoundingly shattered when that twisted tribe of lunatics, deviants, delinquents and every other kind of loose creative cannon under the sun collectively known as ‘the advertising industry” descends upon an unsuspecting Margate to whoop it up in frenzied fashion for the 2007 Loerie Awards.
Known as the Oscars of advertising in South Africa, the Loeries are the definitive barometer of what’s hot right now in the brand communications media. Shrill with brassy bombast and glamour, many consider the Loeries’ presence in Margate an incongruous affair, the equivalent of The Spice Girls playing a single South African concert in Pofadder.
But it is precisely this unexpected element that makes the Loeries in Margate — or, to coin a term, Mollywood — such a blast. When the Loerie juggernaut arrives, Margate is instantly galvanised into a heaving, seething maelstrom of mayhem and madness. In the same manner in which the Cannes Film Festival electrifies the small town on the French Côte d’Azur and New Orleans becomes entirely subsumed by Mardi Gras, Loerie weekend in Margate generates a strange, otherworldly energy that holds all in its thrall. Were the event to take place in the dry, corporate ether of say, Sandton Convention Centre, it would lose its mojo, its madness and its messy magnificence.
Loerie veterans like to quote the infamous aphorism ‘what happens at the Loeries stays at the Loeries” and the veracity of this dictum becomes frighteningly apparent within scant hours of arriving in Margate. The Lord of the Flies syndrome is in full effect as the fetters of civilization dissolve in the warm sea air and visitors and locals alike acquire that crazy gleam in the eye. The simple act of registering for the festival is accompanied by close on a dozen shots of tequila and Bailey’s; by early afternoon everyone is hitting the bars with a vengeance and when the awards ceremony kicks off in a marquee the size of a stadium the collective dial has been set to ‘self-destruct”. And this is only day one.
If the lug-nuts are severely loosened on Saturday, the wheels all but come off on Sunday night when the high-profile, above-the-line Loeries were dished out to all the top agencies in the country where the usual suspects — Ogilvy, Lowe Bull, Jupiter Drawing Room, Net#work, FCB et al — were the big winners while Vega The Brand Communications School sweeps the board in the student category.
Come Monday morning and the cream of South Africa’s advertising industry look severely worse for wear as they climb into the buses and cars that will return them to the world of order that they so successfully escaped for a splendid 48 hours. Drawn and pale, their faces harden and their eyes develop that faraway look as they recall flashes of the chaos and begin to repeat the time-honoured mantra for the long drive home: ‘What happens at the Loeries stays at the Loeries”.
A Grand Prix post-mortem
Had Cape Town’s Jupiter Drawing Room not emerged triumphant at this year’s Loerie Awards with one Grand Prix, one gold, six silver and 16 bronze birdies the prank would have fallen flat on its face. On the second night of this year’s installation of the annual showcase of the South African brand communications industry, employees of Jupiter Drawing Room were armed with wooden spoons that bore the legend: ‘Bend down and take it like you work at Ogilvy.” Many of these ‘fell into the wrong hands” and pretty soon all 5 000 patrons of the ceremony were in on the joke. In the old days the caper would have been termed a practical joke borne of intense agency rivalry. These days it will probably be quoted as a classic case of ‘viral marketing” and probably pick up a Grand Prix for ‘ambient and experiential advertising” at next year’s Loeries.
Speaking of Grands Prix, Loeries 2007 was distinguished by a record number of entries (more than 3 000); a record number of awards (200) and a record number of Grands Prix (five).
Since a Grand Prix is the ultimate accolade that can be bestowed upon a piece of brand communication — be it an entire campaign or a single advert in any medium — winning one requires a fulsome amount of fairy dust and enough X-factor oomph to blow the socks off the judging panel.
Given that said panel is a notoriously stingy cabal of hard-bitten industry experts with the stratospherically high standards of Volvo safety-inspectors, it is rather surprising that several Grands Prix’s were bestowed on advertisements that are hardly, to use a phrase equally abhorred and adored by those in the ad game, ‘pushed the envelope”.
A single billboard with only one of its four lights dimply illuminating the legend ‘use electricity wisely” for Eskom? Sure, not bad, pretty clever, nothing wrong and all that but hardly anything earth-shattering. Yet it won a Grand Prix for Ogilvy. Compared with that, MTN’s excellent ‘The Clap” TV commercial barely scraped a silver and the equally impressive ‘Stickies” spot was awarded a bronze. Furthermore, a campaign to brand a quirky fresh-food concept store called Lulu resulted in a death-by-cutesy-pie affair that bore a suspiciously similar look and feel to Europe’s Prêt-a-Manger chain (which also specialises in fresh, healthy take-away fare). Death by preciousness occurs with the toe-curlingly cringeworthy copy on the product wrappers yet this saccharine eye-candy earned Grid Worldwide Branding and Design a Grand Prix in the communication design category. Jupiter Drawing Room’s ‘What Is An Idea” integrated campaign can probably also count itself lucky to have been granted access to the rarefied ether of Grand Prix-dom.
Then again, Lowe Bull thoroughly deserved a Grand Prix for its ‘Hiroshima/911/JFK/Soweto Uprising” campaign. (See related article). Then we have Impact/BBDO’s eye-popping television commercial for Snickers which unequivocally earned its Grand Prix but should in fact have landed a Grand Grand Prix. Featuring bone-crunching gang warfare between all the little green and red men from the pedestrian robots of a city, the ad is simultaneously high-concept art and brilliantly inspired piece of brand communication that most definitely ‘pushes the envelope” and resides quite comfortably on ‘the cutting edge”. — Alexander Sudheim