• by Joe Mandese , December 15, 2010

The agencies of two big holding company media divisions, Publicis' VivaKi and WPP's GroupM, cleaned up with multiple category awards during Media magazine's 2010 Creative Media Awards in New York Tuesday night, but smaller independents grabbed the attention, especially Austin-based T3, which won Best in Show for an ingenious pro bono, user-activated mobile campaign for local homelessness charity Loaves and Fishes' "I Am Here" campaign in which people texted in messages to raise money to get homeless man Danny Silver off the street - and off a billboard that activated the campaign - and into dependable housing.

T3's "I Am Here" also took top honors in the mobile category, and a number of other independents also broke through, winning a number of high-profile categories, including an executive from Gravity Media, who appeared humble and dumbfounded while accepting the award for the multicultural campaign for an Asian market campaign for satellite TV provider DISH Network that beat out the work of mega agencies.

But VivaKi and GroupM dominated the awards, taking five and four categories, respectively, across their agencies.

VivaKi took top honors in the research/consumer insights category for the Pool's collaborative testing of online video advertising formats, while Starcom won two (communications channel plan and online media: branding) categories; SMG Search one (online media: search), and Spark Communications one (newspapers).

GroupM's MediaCom and Mindshare units took two categories each. MediaCom won for the performance media & marketing category (for Dell's "Behavioral Targeting" campaign), and the television category (for Volkswagen's "VW PunchDub" Campaign").

Mindshare won for the business media category (for Sprint's "Business On Main), and consumer magazine category (for Kimberly-Clark's Huggies' "Countdown" campaign).

Briefs on all the winners and finalists of the 2010 Creative Media Awards can be viewed here.