Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The 2009 Extra Awards

The winners of the 2009 Extra Awards have been announced, and we have a couple of favourites we’d like to highlight. The Extra Awards honours creative excellence in newspaper advertising.  While much of the glory goes to the creative team and the advertising agency, proper recognition should also go to the marketers who desire, demand and then actually approve excellent advertising.

One of our favourites is also one of the most classically simple. It’s a tourism campaign for Newfoundland & Labrador. Instead of opting for overly done clever—and overly minimalist—visual plus logo ads, the work for Newfoundland & Labrador combines beautiful, awe-inspiring photography with smart, insightful headlines. The product, which is the landscape, is embraced fully, as it should be. The shots are so beautiful and intriguing, you feel an immediate urge to step into them. The headlines speak perfectly to, and make the right amount of fun of, their target audience. The first ad shows a man in a chair in his “front yard”. He is dwarfed by his setting, a stretch of the most scenic, untouched coastal landscape imaginable. His perfect little cottage home, a salient icon of peace and simplicity, is also in the shot. The headline reads: Somewhere, in a high-rise condo, someone is trying to figure out how to feng shui. Sadly, it’s true. And we all know it. More importantly for this ad, however, we’d all like to get away from it. For many, I’m guessing, Newfoundland and Labrador just moved to the top of the list.

Another ad we noticed and liked was an Infiniti sponsorship ad for Cirque du Soleil. The ad definitely falls in the common camp of a simple visual, but it’s also smart and artful, with a good-fitting twist. Plus, it balances both Infiniti and Cirque du Soleil quite nicely, something that’s not always easy to do. At first glance, the ad looks like a stretch of highway, nothing but black with a yellow double centerline. However, you won’t miss the diminutive artist, all in white against the black background, dangling near the bottom of the ad from one of the yellow centerlines --which, you quickly see is actually a band of fabric, a la Cirque du Soleil. Bravo! We say. Bravo!

0 Responses to date

Leave a comment

Name:

Email:

URL:

 

Remember personal info?

Comments
[You may use HTML tags for style]

Captcha:

Type the characters you see in the picture above.