If you read my rubbish regularly you know that I have a funny relationship with advertising. But as I’ve tried to stress before I don’t have anything against the advertising industry.
I just think that the digital world has perhaps an uneasy relationship with the advertising establishment. I’ve tried not to get emotional about this or read too much into any of it, but here’s a few things I witnessed at the 2007 Clio Awards in Miami.
- The interactive category got less time in the awards than the student category (it did get more time than radio but only just – and radio only had 2 winners)
- RGA won a grand Clio and two gold awards for Nike+, I was sitting next to a nice man called Chapin from RGA. He didn’t get asked to go up and pick up the awards. Every other agency that won a grand Clio had the whole team go up and get recognised
- The interactive jury didn’t get to meet up to discuss the winners, we did the whole thing online. (In my humble opinion this meant that lots of great work got missed out). Every other jury seemed to have had physical meetings to go through the work – except for perhaps Radio which also seemed to get a bit of a raw deal
- The TV/Radio night was definitely the ‘big night’. The auditorium was full as opposed to 1/2 empty. Even the music changed, a subtle difference, but one that was noticed
- In the ‘gallery’ you could view winning work from print, tv and radio (through a bunch of iPods). But you couldn’t see or experience the digital work anywhere.
I’m not particularly annoyed about it. And it’s probably right that I’m not. Perhaps I should shut up and actually enjoy the fact that digital it still little bit underground and grubby. In fact that’s exactly what I’m going to do :-)