The One Club for Creativity is one of the longest running community which runs advertising awards such as The One Show. The One Show which turns 50 this year, is one of those advertising awards which is believed to have lived upto the expectations of the global advertising industry. In a conversation with BrandWagon Online Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club for Creativity, talks about the journey of the award and the impactance of effectiveness. (Edited Excerpts)
Are there any changes we should expect since it has been 50 years? How would the award see a mark of that celebration?
The Art Director’s Club is part of the One Club for Creativity and that is 102 years old. I’ve worked on making that as relevant as any award show, even if it was a new award show. It’s the same as the one show, now we are 50 years old. I would like to say we are 50 years young. I’m always looking at trends on how we work, and the trends which are relevant to the industry today, a prime example of that is we have just added an Artificial Intelligence (AI) category with the first award show add this category. I’m constantly looking at trends in the industry, and then trying to position ourselves ahead of the curve. Even though, we are 50 years old, we are innovating all times.
The website says that a total of 19,000, submissions had come in 2022. So if you’re going to add new categories this year, how many more submissions do you expect this year?
We have a lot of work entered; I think we should get over 20,000 entries. But it’s not about the number, to be honest. We’re not chasing a number. What we’re just trying to do is chase the best work in the industry being created that year. We have just been very fortunate that the industry sees us as the second-largest global show, and, and supports us tremendously. For us, it’s not about increasing categories to get more entries.
You have categories such as use of data, use of AI, what do you actually see? How can advertising agency brands use data to create some of the best examples?
I think one of the most important thing nowadays is interactive advertising, and which might be social, web-based, might be email-based, could be direct to consumer. All these campaigns are run on the back of data. Not to mention, a lot of data is being collected, and certainly, the brand owns that relationship a lot of the time. What we like to try and do is use that data to get the best possible effectiveness for an ad or commercial. Effective use of data is whether they are mining the data to try and better understand your audience or just using data.
Given that this year, there’s a lot of talk about advertisers being very prudent on ad spends, do you feel it will be an RoI driven ad bussiness? Is that also becoming a problem within the industry?
When judging work, creativity is first and foremost. We look at parameters such as – is this a good idea, is it a big idea? And that’s always top of what we asked the judges to look at. Second parameter is execution and the third is effectiveness We focus on the creative idea and the creative execution so that’s our vision and our mission. I believe that good creative work is effective. When we have a look at what has won, generally, the work has been incredibly effective, especially this year, there’s a piece of work that for Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV, commonly known as AB InBev, by FCB New York called, ‘Anheuser Busch Michelob ULTRA McEnroe vs McEnroe’ which drove sales up tremendously. When you have a look at the earned media from that particular campaign, that had almost earned 4x of what they had spent.
When compared to the global work, where does India stand?
When we have a look at India, in the global creative rankings, especially in the APAC region, agencies such as Leo Burnett, Mumbai is doing incredibly well, they placed second in the ABBYs so I think when we look at the level of creativity in India, it is incredibly good. And that’s why we’ve associated with the ABBY Awards, because for us, this is, I wouldn’t say it’s just an emerging market, but it’s a long-standing market which has really done a lot of great work over the years. But I think it’s time has come now for it to grow this to the next level. With this we hope to see India participate and perform really well on the global stage.