• by April 21, 2004

Exciting news last night on the creative front. The Advertising Club celebrated the 40th anniversary of the International ANDY Awards with a big celebration at Capitale in lower Manhattan.

Creative prowess was rewarded in spades with Wieden & Kennedy, New York, earning the ANDY's new "Yahoo! Big Idea Chair" Award for its Beta 7 entry, an integrated mostly Web-based campaign, and Wieden, London, earning the best-in-show Grandy Award for "Cog," a TV spot for Honda. Omnicom Group's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, snared several awards for its design of the Hewlett-Packard Co. site and banner ads, and Venables, Bells & Partners, San Francisco, received an award for its animated Napster web ad series.

MDC Partners' Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, racked up the most ANDY's this year with 17 awards--6 silver and 11 bronze--for the agency's work on IKEA, the Mini Cooper, and Molson. Publicis Groupe's Leo Burnett and Havas' Arnold Worldwide scored six awards each--Leo for Altoids, Norelco, and Morgan Stanley, Arnold for Volkswagen of America and the American Legacy Foundation.

Goodby nabbed 5 awards for work on behalf of HP, Anheuser-Busch/Budweiser, and the California Milk Processor Board.

Wieden, London's Grandy award, earned for creating the Honda spot "Cog," nets the agency $50,000 in cash and a special Grandy ring honoring the agency as an "Advertising Champion of the World." Wieden, New York, earned 2 silver awards and 1 bronze award for its Jordan, Sega, and Miller Brewing Co. creative. Wieden's Sega NFL/ESPN campaign won the new "Yahoo! Big Idea Chair" Award for most extraordinary work of the show. The integrated multimedia campaign created a unique character that managed to generate millions of online hits and viral interest for the new game.

Yahoo! has tied itself to virtually all high-profile creative advertising events in the last two years (the Clios, the One Show, the ANDYs) as the company continues to evangelize the importance of superior online creative. Just about the only online awards presentation it's not involved in is the interactive portion of the Cannes International Advertising Festival--Microsoft's MSN has that one.

In other news, tomorrow, America Online CEO Jon Miller delivers an update on the division's progress to the Time Warner board. The progress report comes one week prior to Time Warner's April 28 earnings day.

AOL is desperate to show how much progress it's made in programming, ad revenue, and other improvements as the whispers grow louder that a buffing for likely spinoff is now in full swing. Wall Street projections put AOL's value between $7.4 billion and $8 billion.

AOL must settle the pending federal investigations into its accounting practices before any sort of spinoff or acquisition can happen. The Time Warner Cable unit, which will go first, according to insiders, is chafing for a spinoff; the AOL investigations have to be settled before that can happen.