Hasta La Ideas

BETC Euro RSCG’s The Closet for Canal+ was the most awarded commercial of last year, while M&C’s Dixons campaign took the top honour in the print category – this and more is revealed in the latest Gunn Report on adland’s top award winners of the past year

Each year, The Gunn Report, named after its founder Donald Gunn, compiles aggregated league tables of the year’s award winners using a weighted points system to take into account the varying worth of the different adland award schemes. Its findings now play an important role within the industry, even forming the basis for renumeration and performance reviews within agencies.

The Closet (shown above), which won Best in Book in Creative Review’s own Annual, was the stand-out commercial of the year under the Gunn system. Second in that category came Taxi Canada’s Strolling/Reading/Antiquing campaign for Viagra.

In third, came Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi of Buenos Aires with Check/You’re Right/Shh for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. Shh is shown below.

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In print, M&C Saatchi’s cheeky Dixons campaign swept all before it.

Joint second came AlmapBBDO for Billboard

and TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris for The Zimbabwean

In interactive, the most awarded work was Facebook Showroom for Ikea from Forsman & Bodenfors

The World’s Biggest Signpost for Nokia by Farfar came second

And, breaking the Swedish duopoly, The Martin Agency’s We Choose The Moon website celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing was in third

Interestingly, only one purely digital agency (Farfar) appears in the top five most awarded digital campaigns – the rest being from ‘traditional’ agencies (perhaps we will have to stop using that term now).

In order to reflect the complexity of campaigns that employ all manner of media, Gunn recently introduced an extra category for so-called integrated work named, somewhat painfully, All Gunns Blazing.

The most awarded work here was the Nike Livestrong Campaign from Wieden + Kennedy Portland, which included the Nike Chalkbot message writing machine.

Second came The Zimbabwean and, joint third, JWT Italia’s Are You Still With Us for Heineken

and House Of Cards by Leo Burnett London (and Pentagram) which added an art show and pack of giant size cards with artist prints in support of a memorable spot

So what are we to make of all this? As previously mentioned, the Gunn Report is taken extremely seriously within agencies but there are some points worth bearing in mind. Because results are based on totting up points across all the schemes it recognises across the year, major success with one piece of work can distort the overall picture. Therefore, BETC is shown as the second most awarded agency of the year last year, but that is mostly down to the Closet commercial.

Likewise, the UK can take comfort in the fact that it is listed as the second most highly awarded country after the US, but does that mean that it is second to the US in terms of the quality of work produced? Only three UK pieces of work appear in the four top five categories of most awarded work by media, so perhaps its second place is due to it having entered a lot of middling work in awards, without hitting too many individual high notes? Similarly, the two advertisers with the most highly acclaimed work are VW and NIke, but then they are also two of the biggest spenders.

Here are the tables in full:

For the full results, go to the Gunn Report website here

With hundreds of channels on the EPG, television can be a very crowded place these days. Discovery Networks’ UK ECD Federico Gaggio talked to CR about the challenges for designers working on TV and the latest Discovery ‘refresh’

Ever since Lambie-Nairn virtually invented the idea of broadcast branding on British TV in the 80s, things have become steadily more complex for anyone with a non-terrestrial subscription and, by extension, for the designers working on those channels. Not only are there multiple channels competing in similar areas – music, factual, comedy etc – but those channels may even be showing the same content. US science geek sitcom Big Bang Theory, for example, can currently be found both on E4 and Warner.

TV designers have to cope with both practical issues – how do viewers know what channel they’re on? – and branding issues – how do we establish a clear tone of voice amid all this clutter? Under Federico Gaggio’s creative direction, Discovery has fared better than most, utilising an impressive list of collaborators including Spin, Devilfish, Brothers and Sisters and Red Bee to pick up a host of Promax awards in recent years, but the challenges have been considerable. “It used to be a lot easier,” Gaggio admits. “Discovery was the first in that factual space which meant it didn’t need to make an effort in order to be found.”

Now, it must compete with the likes of National Geographic, the History Channel and a host of others. And because of the sequential nature of Electronic Programme Guides, with viewers flicking up and down the lists of grouped, similar content, many think they are viewing a Discovery channel when in fact they are watching a rival, he says. Things have been further clouded by the endless sub-channels that have proliferated recently – Discovery now has 13 channels including Discovery History and Discovery Science.

“Your success in creating loyalty depends on how well you deliver your branding,” Gaggio says. “People search for content but they do it in places that they feel an affinity with. If you can establish an emotional connection with your audience it might mean they will pay attention when you propose content: if that same content is on another channel, they won’t pay attention to it.”

Discovery History promo created with Brothers and Sisters

The prime tool for doing that is via idents which can fulfil that dual role of station identification and brand building. Discovery has previously based its idents around one of its key attributes – the fact that it makes its own content and has recognisable ‘stars’ such as Bear Grylls.

“We went down the route of focussing more on our content and making the association between the brand and its content clear,” Gaggio says. “We did that by getting rid of abstract idents and using the content as a branding device via show intros which featured a still of the show concerned – they were very useful for people using PVRs because when you are fast-forwarding you would know when to stop. It created a very effective package in terms of navigation and was very clear but became a bit cold and detached. We went a bit overboard, people might have missed visual presence of brand,” he admits.

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

In a ‘refresh’ from Grant Gilbert’s Double G Studios and Dixon Baxi, Discovery has sought to tackle this by introducing a new branding device – placing content from the shows within the globe of the networks’ logo and creating an abbreviated form of the logo using just the initial D of Discovery.

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

“We did a four-way pitch [for the refresh] and everyone came up with the same idea of putting content into the globe,” Gaggio says. “We’d always treated it as sacred before but it’s great to have a simpler symbol which we are now able to play with much more.”

Design and production: DoubleG Studios with Discovery UK Creative

See more from Discovery UK Creative here

Japanese architect Hayato Komatsu has completed the interiors for this clinic in Hiroshima, Japan, which is located within a shopping centre.

Due to the height of the original space, the architect has inserted a gabled ceiling to create a more intimate atmosphere and has left the walls of the treatment rooms slightly shorter, making a feature of the sloping ceiling.

The interior walls and ceiling are clad in strips of wood with an array of fluorescent tube lights on the sloping planes.

The clinic’s storefront façade provides passer-by’s with clear views into the clinic.

The treatment rooms are located at the rear of the space, carefully partitioned to prevent any direct views into them.

More clinics and medical facilities on Dezeen »
More interiors on Dezeen »

Here’s some more information from the architect:

This project is a plan for moving and reopening an internal clinic in a shopping mall on the outskirts of Hiroshima. The shopping mall has a high ceiling and, therefore, so does the clinic that occupies space within it.

The clinic’s surrounding corridors are bustling with shoppers. The client requested to make good use of the high ceiling. However, keeping the open space increases the risk of heating/cooling and ventilation problems.

So we inclined the ceiling to intonate the height, and we controlled the room space to adjust the volume of the room.

Furthermore, we made all the walls the same height and created space in between the walls and the ceiling like a partition style.

This showed the ceiling as “a big roof” spanning all rooms and so giving the space depth, brightness and a comfortable feeling.

In considering the privacy of people coming into the clinic, we managed, without closing the facade, to arrange each room to allow in light but yet in such a way to stop the direct view of outsiders.

In total, it looks like a wooden Kura (a traditional Japanese storehouse), but we feel that this magnanimous space gives people repose and comfort.

Site: Hiroshima,JPN
Principal use: Clinic
Floor area: 174.58m²
Completion: Dec.2010

See also:

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GKK Dental Ambulatory by Xarchitecten	D.Vision Dental Clinic by A1Architects	Be Clinique by Openlab Architects

Un court film expérimental intitulé “Core” avec de très beaux éléments de polygones, modélisés en 3D, et se rassemblant afin de former un être humain. Un design et une animation du collectif russe Selfburning, le tout sur un sound-design d’Alexey Devyanin. A découvrir dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Alexey Kurbatov
• Dyson – Winter Tale
• People Too

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If you haven’t been following the sports pages lately, particularly with regard to college football players readying themselves for the NFL draft, you might have missed the story capturing lots of news outlets’ and blogs’ attention in the form of Stanford‘s quarterback, Andrew Luck. A finalist for the coveted Heisman Trophy, the star player surprised many by announcing that he wasn’t going to throw himself into the draft so that he could finished his last two years of school. His major? Architecture. While an immediate career in professional football might have earned him in the tens of millions of dollars, the industry he’s decided to stick with for the time being has had one of its rockiest patches of the last few decades and is only now slowly (very slowly) starting to inch its way back toward recovery. Hundreds of critics have weighed in over the last couple of weeks (Luck made the announcement on the 6th), with some siding with the player/student, some taking the middle road, and others not just writing negative pieces about him, but often even leading with their disbelief, like in this piece entitled “Andrew Luck is an Idiot.” So divided are people over his decision that even Archinect‘s comments section about the news were fairly evenly split. And who knows in the end? Maybe the decision was helped to boost press, or give him another shot at the Heisman, or maybe he really does want an architecture degree (though how far one at the undergraduate level will take him in the profession is another conversation entirely). In the end, it’s an interesting story, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading a million opinions about it, we encourage you search his name in Google News, because there are more than a few out there.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.