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