Accelerate Grads '06

Awards, awards, awards…

The first thing that someone will do when they are explaining their particular marketing agency and what it does is to list their flashiest and most impressive clients. The second thing they will do is reel off the awards and accolades that they have recently received. “We were Campaign’s Digital Agency of the Year 2004”, “We won the Cannes Print Award with our creative”, “We got an IPA Effectiveness Award last year for our campaign” etc etc.

While film stars want an Oscar, athletes want an Olympic gold and scientists want a Nobel Prize, those in the marketing communications industry want Awards. The trouble is there are so many ceremonies and within each one so many different awards categories that the prestige of winning one of them is somewhat diluted. In addition the cost of entering a piece of creative into one of these awards competitions is quite considerable. At Claydon Heeley we have just put forward 3 pieces of creative for the

Paris based Epica Awards and it has cost us €800 (and that was pretty reasonable). So inevitably the smaller, independent agencies simply can’t enter so frequently.

However, awards are still a good way to measure an agency’s success and to highlight their strong-points. For example, some agencies excel in digital whilst others seem to always scoop up in the outdoor category. The awards websites are also great places to check out some of the latest and most innovative stuff that is going on in the industry.

Have a look at:

http://www.canneslions.com/winners_site/film/

http://www.dandad.org/awards/awards.html

http://www.oneclub.org/os/

Any Qs just give me a shout,

Soph

The Funnel

Hey guys,

It's Friday morning and I'm just finishing my 4th week at the direct marketing company Claydon Heeley (http://www.chjm.com/flash.html). Although this is only my first placement I have totally been thrown in at the deep end.

I spent my first three weeks working on a pitch to try to win a new American client. I had to help run brainstorms, have meetings with all the big guns, and then go along and present at the pitch itself. A lot of the time I haven't fully understood what's been going on but the best way of learning is definitely by doing and being on this scheme certainly gives you that opportunity.

The company recognises that you will only be there for a few months so they really try to get you involved in as much as possible during that time and the learning curve has just been exponential.

One of the biggest breakthroughs I have had so far came in the form of a very simple diagram called 'the funnel' which looks like one of those hour glass things.

Download funnel1.bmp

The top part of the funnel is what the Planners do. They basically get a whole load of information directly from the client, research a whole load more, and then break the entire lot down and build it back together again into one distilled punchline sentence.

This concise summary is the creative brief and it's purpose is to guide and inspire the creative team.

The bottom part of the funnel is what the Creatives do. They take this briefing of what needs to be said and to whom and go wild having a tonne of crazy ideas . Both tasks require insight, intuition and creativity and both are great teams to be involved with.

Well, that's my bit of info for today, if you have any Qs gimme a shout.

Have a good wkend,

Soph x