'Raffles Place ghost' scoops Singapore Effies Grand Prix

The campaign, which also took a Gold award, featured a viral video of two executives encountering a ghost while working late. It created a media frenzy last year as international and local media speculated on the authenticity of the clip.

Farrokh Madon, McCann Erickson Singapore’s ECD, said “to win Singapore’s first ever Effies Grand Prix vindicates my belief that great creativity leads to great brand awareness and sales.”

Other Gold winners included Kinetic and Mindshare’s ‘World on sale’ campaign for Zuji, Ogilvy and Zenith’s ‘Stretching Durex in new ways’ campaign for Durex and DDB and Zenith’s ‘Geeks not freaks’ campaign for StarHub.

DDB was the most awarded agency with six wins, while Ogilvy won four.  A total of 19 awards, including one Grand Prix, along with four Gold awards, seven Silver awards and seven Bronze awards, were handed out. This year, 36 entries from 16 categories made it to the finals, out of a total of 80 entries from 35 categories.

Chief judge and Bates141 regional planning director, Frederique Covington, said this year’s event was “more in touch with the times” and most of the winners worked from smaller budgets as well.

She added: “There was a lot more innovative use of media among this year’s winners. So we saw more viral campaigns, more social media and digital work while public relations and events also became foundations for ideas. The quality of local insights in this year’s winners was also apparent as there was a real genuine attempt to understand the local Singaporean audience and to bring that across in the work.”