AMES winners revealed

From a shortlist of 289, the AMES juries named 144 winners from 10 countries, handing out three platinum, 26 gold, 45 silver and 70 bronze trophies at the awards ceremony at the Grand Hyatt Singapore.

Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney won two platinum and three gold awards for 'Penny the pirate' on behalf of Luxottica. Other notable winners included:

• Lowe Vietnam for 'Castrol drive on', with a platinum and a bronze
• BBDO Pakistan with four gold awards for 'Not a bug splat' on behalf of Reprieve/Foundation for Fundamental Rights
• MRM//McCANN Singapore with three gold awards for 'The Red Cross connection' on behalf of the Singapore Red Cross.

In addition to the 144 trophies, Lowe Lintas + Partners was named the Effectiveness Agency of the Year, BBDO Pakistan earned the title Media Strategy Agency of the Year and BBDO/Proximity China rode its wins to the Digital Strategy Agency of the Year title.

On a country basis, India led the region with 31 trophies, followed closely by China, Australia and New Zealand. However, Australia arguably had the strongest overall performance, with two platinums and seven golds among its 24 total awards, compared with no platinum and only two golds for India.

Judges comments

Herve Bullot, senior director, global strategic insights at Johnson & Johnson and jury member for the data and analytics and e-commerce category, commended the work entered this year, stating that Asia-Pacific had “nothing to envy” in comparison to other global markets.

However, commenting on the standard of the awards this year, Charles Cadell, APAC president at McCann Worldgroup and member of the effectiveness jury said that despite some “outstanding” work, the quality of entries was below that of previous years.

“Overall we felt that the quality of work this year was below what we’ve seen in previous years,” he said. “There was some great work—which was truly outstanding—but the general quality of entries was not up there.”

Cadell added that whilst some excellent work was entered, the entries themselves had not been strong enough to warrant an award. He stressed that for effectiveness awards entries to be truly successful, clients needed to be willing to share their campaign results with agencies.

“There was some great work that we desperately wanted to award, but they just didn’t present the results," he said.."Unless the client is engaged with the agency, it’s not worth entering these effectiveness awards, as you just can’t show the results.”

Meanwhile, Rod Strother, director of digital and social media centre of excellence, stressed the value of well-written entry, a sentiment also shared by Cadell. “A really good entry can bring up work that’s OK, and vice-versa,” Strother said. “We saw some really good work that was poorly written.”

Oliver Spalding, regional head of strategy for Greater China and Southeast Asia with DigitasLBi, agreed on both the above points. "The quality of the award documents was a bit hit and miss," he said. "I can’t post-rationalise a strategy from a great execution and only putting percentage growth figures makes skeptical judges even more skeptical. Several great entries were discounted because the submission wasn’t clear. My suggestion, start with the results and make sure you’ve really got an effectiveness story before getting your award-writing going."

Breakdowns and full listings of the winners follow. Please join us tomorrow for more coverage of today's AMES conference.

AWARDS BY CATEGORY

AWARDS BY COUNTRY

WINNERS BY AWARD LEVEL

• Platinum
• Gold
• Silver
• Bronze

PLATINUM WINNERS

GOLD WINNERS

SILVER WINNERS

BRONZE WINNERS