The Gemas Effie Mena Awards 2011 was a night of ooohs and aahs. Some won big, some carved new milestones, and some missed the mark by a few points at the event that wraps up the regional industry’s awards for the year.
Hosted by Communicate’s sister publication, Gulf Marketing Review, the evening at Madinat Jumeirah in November began with the ceremonial mingling of the industry and clients before setting the stage for a night of anticipation and excitement. With American singer Michael Bolton’s concert right next door at the Madinat, everyone was geared up to make some noise.
It was a big moment for media agency OMD, claiming 12 awards for its clients. OMD Egypt was the most awarded agency of the night as it swept six awards across four categories, including two Golds for Henkel’s “El Balad Baladna” (non-food FMCG and Best Use of CSR categories) with TBWA\Egypt, and a Silver and a Bronze for Marico Egypt Industries’ “Haircode Sachet” campaign with DDB.
However, the highlight (and shocker for some) was when independent agency from Beirut, Interesting Times, clinched the coveted Grand Prix. Its “Courage is contagious” campaign for the launch in Lebanon of new beer brand “Lebanese Brew,” by client Snowball SAL, quickly impressed the judges and won first a Gold in the Best Product Launch category, eventually making its way to the Grand Prix.
Lebanese Brew’s launch was all the more delicate as the new brand had to gain market shares in a multinational brand-dominated market. It used social media to engage youth and create some buzz around the new product, as well as activation that worked around limitations. The campaign “demonstrated all the things we looked for: ambition and focus, understanding and intelligence, perseverance and bravery, and all that presented with charm and humility,” Judd Labarthe, chairman of the Gemas Effie jury, executive planning director at marketing services agency G2 Germany and Effie Worldwide representative, said in his speech at the event.
However, “Courage is contagious” was in close competition with Memac Ogilvy Label and Mindshare Tunisia’s “June 16th 2014” campaign for Brand Collective Tunisia, which also won Gold. “There was quite a lot of debate about those two cases,” Labarthe tells Communicate. “It would be an oversimplification to say that one of the cases won our hearts and the other case won our minds. Frankly, either one would have been a very worthy winner, but at the end of the day, we ended up making our decision on the basis of the somewhat stronger evidence presented in the “Courage is Contagious” case that tied the marketing results back to specific marketing initiatives.” David Porter, media director at Unilever MENA, who was also on the judging panel, adds: “When we judged the two [campaigns] objectively in terms of the kinds of awards that the Effies are, the Grand Prix winner won on the basis that this is an effectiveness award. Had we been judging [using] different criteria, that may not have been the case.”
What impressed Porter about the “Courage is contagious” campaign “was the level of consistent attention to detail and never-say-die attitude to take a brand from nothing to a decent market share… It’s no easy task to perform like that against multinational competition.”
The Marketer of the Year award went to Ramzy Abouezzeddine, group head of marketing and communication at Lebanon-based Bank Audi. According to Julien Hawari, co-CEO of Mediaquest Corp, “the winner is someone who through strategy, innovation and communication excellence, has been responsible for making their brand, product or service an outstanding success. Working with [media monitoring and analytics company] Fish Eye Analytics, we identified 50 potential marketers and narrowed it down to Abouezzedine for his outstanding work with Bank Audi SAL-Audi Saradar Group.”
Incidentally, Bank Audi’s “Loubnani” campaign, developed by Leo Burnett Beirut and Starcom MediaVest Group, won Gold in the Banking, Finance and Insurance category.
Also among the seven Gold winners were Mindshare MENA for Nissan Middle East’s “Tiida Troops” campaign and Impact BBDO Beirut for Lebanese Broadcast Corporation’s “Cheyef 7alak” campaign.
“Most of the Gold winners would hold their own against any entry anywhere else on the planet. They really were of an exceptionally high quality,” says Porter. Labarthe agrees: “I would stack the strongest of the Effie cases [I’ve seen here], quite confidently against the best of the Effie cases I’ve ever judged anywhere.”
Silver winners included the “Battle of the Garages” campaign for Chevrolet Silverado by Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), “Man Up” for Procter & Gamble by SMG & Tattoo 360, and “The HSBC Sale” by JWT Dubai and Mindshare MENA.
The Leo Burnett network took home four awards. These include the Gold for the “Loubnani” campaign, a Silver for the “Fake it all” campaign – which had already won a Silver at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – by its Beirut office and SMG, and a Silver for Leo Burnett Cairo’s “Man Up Phase 2” campaign for Al Ahram Beverages.
There were no winners in the Electronics/Computers category. “We just didn’t see that they were award-worthy,” says Labarthe. “The shortlisted cases were a bit of a grab bag in which there was a lot of the field of dreams strategy. The cases we saw just didn’t stand out in a way that was award-worthy. They weren’t bad cases, but they just weren’t good enough to really crack the upper parts of the scores they needed…in order to win.”
Overall, Porter tells Communicate he saw an “incredible range” of work at this year’s Effies. Yet, “at the other extremes, there were ones that were really very poor both in terms of content and construction. There were some where I didn’t personally feel there had been any serious effort put into any of the four criteria – so there would be very unclear objectives, there would be no big idea, there would be nothing original about how campaigns have been made to happen, and there were no results – so very few results given. There may have been good work
done, but it didn’t come out in the entry; and these are effectiveness awards, so I was a little surprised to see entries with no tangible results in them.”
During his speech at the Effies, Labarthe said, “We saw some great campaigns let down by not-so-great cases, entries that looked terrific on paper, but slumped when we saw the creative work, a few ideas that were incredibly smart, but were just too small to judge as campaigns, and lots of social-media activity busily looking for some legitimate marketing purpose. But we also saw entries that absolutely took our breath away, with their daring, their intelligence, their innovation and their ability to create meaningful changes – not just in the marketplace, but the culture surrounding it – and, of course, with the care and clarity with which they defended their strategic choices.”
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