Great Fun at MITX last night

I always love going down to the MITX awards in Boston. I’ve been involved in MITX since 1998 (when it was called MIMC). One of my first jobs was preparing a children’s entertainment product for a MIMC exhibition at the Museum of Science.

The awards ceremony brings together some of the best digital talent around, and clearly shows the vibrancy of the Boston digital scene. I’ve always tried to bring members of my team down from Burlington to have them experience the energy of that community.

It also helps that some of the top agencies are there, competing with medium, small and even in-house teams. When I started entering (and winning) work here, the Barbarian Group reigned supreme and were the bar the rest of us sought to reach up to. Nowadays we have firms like Mullen who’ve re-energized their own internal teams and the rest of the Boston community along the way.

Last night I was lucky (extremely lucky) enough to take home my first award for Digalicious. Being a virtual digital marketing firm, based in Vermont, competing in something like this forces me, and my virtual team to continually push each other to the level of some of the top digital firms around. While winning is a blast, it’s also an affirmation that we’re on the right track, and that the virtual model can be successful. This year Digalicious won for Best Direct Response Campaign for the work we did for Fletcher Allen Health Care.

 In all honesty, though, the highlight of the evening was spending time with people like Steve Curran of Pod Design, Mike Schneider of Allen & Gerritsen, Troy Kelley of Arnold and Edward Boches of Mullen. Awards are nice, but the people are what inspire.

Congratulations to all of the winners and to all of the finalists as well. And keep up the great work, MITX, of bringing together this group of talented and creative people.

 

And the winner is…

Congratulations to R/GA as Adweek’s Digital Agency of the Year.  R/GA is a great example of a company tapping into the power of digital by building platforms instead of focusing on attention.

And congratulations, too, to Adweek’s  U.S. Agency of the Year, Crispin Porter Bogusky. CPB does amazing work and is as good at getting attention for its clients as it is at getting attention for itself. It truly walks the walk.

Now, of course, there’s backlash at giving Digital its own AOY. Funny, anointing a media agency of the year somehow doesn’t elicit that much controversy. That itself says a lot. Brian Morrissey and Spyro Kourtis ask the question “Do we need a Digital AOY?”

I think we shouldn’t ask “Do we need fewer awards?” We should say “We need MORE awards.” Personally, I think Adweek should be more like Major League Baseball.

We need a Most Valuable Agency Award. We need an Agency Cy Young Award. We need Gold Glove winners, by specialty (PR, Direct, Search, Event, you name it). We need Agency Rookie of the Year Award and Agency Comeback Player of the Year. We need Best Manager for Planners.

Why be stingy? The big elephants will always get their due, we shouldn’t worry about hurting their feelings. Spread the wealth around and give credit where credit is due.

MITX Awards

MITX announced its finalists in its 2008 Interactive Awards competition. This is the 5th year I’ve judged in the competition and while I've competed for the past 7 years. The MITX awards have always been, in my opinion, one of the better award competitions in the interactive space.

This year I judged the Best Brand and Best Integrated Campaigns. I noticed two big differences this year.

First, the level of entries was the highest I’ve seen in any of the competitions I've judged (and I judge a number of them, including WebAwards and W3 Awards).  That’s saying a lot for MITX where in years past shops Barbarian Group and Zugara dominated the awards.

Second, I was surprised and delighted to see such a wide range of entries in the Integrated Campaign category. Yes, the big agencies had a number of entries, but there were also some great smaller shops and client entries. It showed that, across the board, everyone took the idea of digital centric campaigns seriously.

What’s less clear, though, is what an “integrated campaign” actually consists of.  In the old agency days, integrated meant that everything, whatever it was, had to look exactly the same. Repetition, however, does not equal integration. Now, it looks like shops deem integration to mean that you have a clear media mix of offline and online marketing. Integration means lots of touch points including digital.

I think a better definition would be that each medium adds it’s unique engagement opportunity to your marketing dialogue. Kind of like the sum is greater than all of its parts.

Take an example of a campaign that lets people upload their own picture and voice recording online. Wouldn't a good integrated print or outdoor execution include some type of mirror so you could start seeing yourself as you would in the final conversion? Wouldn’t the mobile integration ask you to record the message and then download the background music as a ringtone?

To me, integration is a finely tuned machine, all working in unison, but with each part doing something unique that makes the whole better.

I would love to see those campaigns.

It’s Award Season

I just found out that three pieces of my work won awards in this year’s W3 Awards.

Start Where You Are, which won a Web Award and an Adobe Site of the Day, took a Gold Award.

Two others received a Silver Award: the Stowe “I Found It” rich media banner, a previous winner of an IAC award, and NewBulbInTown.com, for the energy efficiency utility Efficiency Vermont. New Bulb had previously won an Adobe SOD as well.

Those awards mark an end to an era: they’re my last awards for work I did at Kelliher Samets Volk. It was an amazing and somewhat unlikely run, given the fact that there were never more than 3 of us in the interactive group.  But we racked up a good deal of recognition.

For this last round, thanks again to Corey, Joe, The Hired Pens, Ken and all the others who helped make this work award-worthy.

VSAC is a Winner

The Web Marketing Association awarded StartWhereYouAreVT.org a Standard of Excellence award for Education in this year’s WebAward competition. The site was part of an innovative campaign I helped develop at KSV to get young teens interested in continuing their education.

We pretty much turned expectations and conventional wisdom on its head by creating a Web centric outreach aimed at rural kids. The awards are nice (it won an Adobe Site of the Day as well) but the reaction from the kids themselves (they deemed it a “rock star”) was proof that VSAC found a new way to reach their young audience. All this from an organization that originally expected a TV campaign.

The site lets kids create a visual college of  “who they are.” It gets them to start thinking about what they like to do, and how that might actually lead to a career.

I led the engagement planning, digital strategy and interactive work. Julie Kravetz did the amazing planning, and I was lucky to work with the great interactive team of Corey Machanic (ICD/AD), Anna Goldsmith (copy) and Joe Manley (Flash Development).

Congrats team!

Stowe is a winner

Just got an email from Jeff Wise, Director of PR at Stowe Mountain Resort. They received a Magellan Award from Travel Weekly for last year’s “I Found It” online campaign.

Awards are always fun, but it’s even more fun when the client enters the work for an award, rather than the agency producing it.

So here’s a rousing congratulations to Mike, Jeff, Sean and the rest of the marketing group at Stowe. This is a marketing group that gets it. They’ve made the shift to digital marketing and have the business results to show what a smart move that is. I was lucky to work with them as they understood and got excited about the digital space, more so than some agency people do.

This was part of the work I did for them over the past two years while at KSV. The campaign was a microsite posing as a banner. I was responsible for strategy, creative direction and, gulp, project management. Corey Machanic did the great art direction and Anna Goldsmith wrote the copy.

You can see the banner here.

So for those of you out in the interactive and digital world, frustrated at the pace that marketers will shift to digital, I give you a true winner: Stowe Mountain Resort.