Gold
Winner: Julie Porter
Agency: Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Creative Director: David Abbott
Art Director: Walter Campbell
Copywriter: Tom Carty
Client: Volvo
Product: Volvo 850
Volvo is a two per cent brand in a highly competitive marketplace where
its established values are not attractive to new drivers who are vital
to a brand’s long-term success.
The 850 T-5 seemed to offer product attributes, particularly in the area
of driving performance, that could overturn the negative feelings of
conquest customers. However, research on creative work generated to a
purely product-based strategy revealed that while the performance
attributes were important, recruiting conquests would also rely on
changing Volvo brand image perceptions as well.
Research also showed that central to Volvo’s negative brand image was
negative user imagery. However, Volvo owners defined themselves in a way
that was far from the negative stereotype and saw themselves as
intelligent, independent, successful and confident people.
The creative angle of the resulting campaign was ‘intelligent people who
take risks’ and provided the guiding logic for the development of the
‘photographer’ and ‘twister’ films.
Silver
Winner: Mark Blair
Agency: Ogilvy and Mather
Creative Director: Patrick Collister
Art Director: Ian Sizer
Copywriter: Nicola Gill
Client: SmithKline Beecham
Product: Lucozade NRG
Lucozade sales have historically been relatively weak with teenagers,
except on the club scene. There was, therefore, an opportunity to line-
extend a ‘flanker’ product for the brand.
The brief - ‘pull the pin on a taste explosion’ - derives from the
characteristics of the product and pack. Early creative work answered
the brief directly, producing some aggressive, sub-Peperami advertising.
Creative development research showed that this approach was out of
kilter with both the characteristics of the brand, which has wholesome
undertones, and 90s teenagers, who do not reject society in a such a
vociferous way as previous generations. The insight for NRG came from
bastardising a core value of the Lucozade brand: ‘Participants enjoy
life more then spectators.’
The problem was how to express this in a way that fitted in with both
the teenage attitude and the Lucozade brand. One thing that teenagers
love, almost despite themselves, is madcap mayhem such as the Beano and
Monty Python.
Modern teenagers love to subvert the past, while also taking an
anachronistic pleasure in retro. This was the final piece in the
creative brief.
Bronze
Winner: Laurence Green
Agency: Lowe Howard-Spink
Creative Director: Paul Weinberger
Art Director: Tom Notman
Copywriter: Alistair Wood
Client: Whitbread
Product: Flowers
Faced with a resurgent ales market, Whitbread was keen ‘to do a
Boddingtons’ with another of the brands in its portfolio. Flowers was
an undifferentiated brand apparently offering neither a meaningful
product proposition nor compelling provenance. Strategic research had
merely served to fuel pessimism about the brand’s potential.
Planning then released the brand from the dual constraints of product
and provenance by establishing that brand personality was the new ales
advertising agenda. All that remained was for the agency to establish
Flower’s personality. Unenlightened by research, Lowes asserted that
Flowers could be the quintessentially English brand.
Commendation
Winner: Max Burt
Agency: Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO
Creative Director: David Abbott
Art Director: Ron Brown
Copywriter: David Abbott
Client and Product: BT
