Commentary

Newspaper Finalists

Some marketers may have lost interest in newspapers, but these dramatic campaigns proved there's still plenty of room for innovation.

Fallon

Citibank

Heather Kruse, Group Media Director; Shala Terfer, Media Supervisor; Chad Koehnen, Assistant Media Planner

When Citibank acquired First American Bank of Texas in 2005, it had the formidable challenge of introducing the Citi brand to Texas, a state with strong allegiances to local banks and an aversion to national ones.

Fallon created a strategy that relied heavily on newspapers. Fallon placed ads in local papers that aligned Citi's brand message, "Healthy Approach to Money," with specific newspaper sections. For example, "Number crunching won't do anything for your abs" ran in sports sections. "No one ever worked so hard that milk squirted out of their nose" ran in comics.

Texans took notice. Unaided brand awareness jumped 35 percent during the campaign, and brand relevance increased 34 percent.

Click here to see the original entry.

MindShare

Radikal Newspaper

MindShare's Purple People

Advertisers notoriously prefer the more visible right-hand pages in newspapers, leaving the left-hand pages a bit empty. To bolster demand, MindShare conceived of a new format for Radikal newspaper's monthly design supplement: right-hand pages only.

How did MindShare defy the laws of media physics? By printing the left-hand pages upside down. Readers first read only the "right" pages, and then turned the supplement upside down and started from the second beginning. This allowed advertisers to place all of their visuals on right-hand pages. Previous supplements sold an average of less than 1,000 column centimeters of advertising; this issue sold 3,590 column centimeters.

The campaign not only pleased advertisers; it also positioned Radikal as willing to exploit the design field to everyone's advantage. It created a perception for readers that the paper is a design-conscious, innovative, and yes, radical publication.

Click here to see the original entry.

Mindshare Canada

Gillette Canada

MindShare Canada: Neil Cameron, Media Supervisor

The Toronto Star: Graham Morton, Ad Builder; Amanda Newell, National Packaged Goods Account Manager

Gillette Canada: Vivian Mah, Product Manager, Oral-B Manual Toothbrushes

In a Madison Ave. role reversal, MindShare Canada asked The Toronto Star to function as its creative agency for the launch of a new Gillette Oral B Pulsar campaign. The newspaper's own ad department came up with a series of amusing banner ads that played off the editorial content of each section.

A banner on the paper's news section read, "Great News for the Mouth." On the front page of the food section: "The best news for the mouth since peanut butter met chocolate in 1971." For the gossip page: "The best news for the mouth since Angelina Jolie first appeared onscreen in 1993."

The ads pushed the envelope of branded content and generated strong word-of-mouth. Gillette cut the rest of its print campaign, choosing the smart-mouth Star banners to run on the section fronts of other Canadian newspapers. Click here to see the original entry.

For more information about the Creative Media Awards ceremony go here.

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