The 2010 GEMAS Effies took place at the Madinat Jumeirah on November 4, with advertising industry leaders rubbing shoulders with their leading clients in anticipation for the night’s prize-giving ceremony. The GEMAS Effies, now in their second year of affiliation with the Effies in New York, are highly coveted awards in the industry, as they reward the effectiveness of campaigns, rather than just their creativity.
Even so, Fadi Yaish, creative director of FP7 Bahrain, praised the judging panel for incorporating creativity into their decisions. “I think there was a great influence of the ideas rather than just the numbers,” says Yaish. “I believe the jury tried to work out a perfect formula of winning hearts and market share, which is the way to go, as one should never segregate the two.”
FP7 Bahrain and Egypt won a combined total of five awards for the agency’s clients, with work for Batelco, and GM and Coca Cola respectively. Other big winners include OMD and TBWA/Raad. The latter won the Grand Prix for its Standard Chartered uaefoodexplorer.com campaign. “I always thought we stood a chance,” says Ian Carvalho, a senior account director at TBWA/Raad who worked on the winning campaign. “When I saw the shortlist, I was quite confident we’d win. We were the only campaign that looked at business objectives from a long-term perspective, not just short-term. It’s quite innovative, disruptive, and different from the campaigns we had seen. Honestly, winning the Grand Prix was quite an achievement for us, and we are extremely ecstatic about it.”
OMD’s clients won several awards, including two for Beiersdorf’s Nivea Angelstar campaign. Firas Ghazal, director of planning at OMD, says that the judging panel this year was more conservative and selective, which proves that the awarded work was given a proper assessment. OMD accounts won big at the Effies this year, racking up six awards throughout the night for various campaigns. Ghazal was part of the team that produced the Nivea Angelstar campaign for Beiersdorf, which won two awards: Bronze for best youth marketing campaign, and Silver in the cosmetics and fragrances category. “We looked at what consumers want, and what consumers liked,” says Ghazal. “[…] The insights we found translated into a big idea, and that big idea transcended into different touchpoints. There has to be a link between insights, ideas, and execution; if any of the three didn’t work, the campaign wouldn’t have worked.”
The judges say they have seen a shift in the region’s work. Hubert Boulos, regional managing director of Mac DDB and chairman of the judging panel, said in his opening speech: “It seems the global crisis has acted as a catalyst and a wakeup call for change in this region. Today, the GEMAS Effies winners have all fully embraced change, and moved from a ‘rational mind fallacy’ to an ‘emotional mind reality.’ It has taken a lot of courage to dare abandon the old model and a lot of creative talent to match that challenge, but it definitely paid off. The opposition between creative awards and business-building awards has clearly come to an end.” Boulos added that the judging panel awarded what he called social creativity – ideas that showed “true out-of-the-box thinking and creativity, that engage consumers beyond the old-style monologue and go into a true dialogue that ultimately leads to participation, playing, and sharing.”
