DDB’s Nick Dellabarca and Liz Richards scooped up the supreme award out of 53 teams which entered Pixel 361°, APN Outdoor’s first annual outdoor creative challenge. The win will see them head to SXSW in Austin, Texas in March next year while both the highly commended and people’s choice awards went to Aaron Carbines and Mike Felix of Us&Co.
The awards were held at Auckland’s Seafarers club where the teams gathered to find out their fate after they were tasked with communicating the Men’s Health Trust goal to provoke men to make healthier lifestyle choices, starting “today” using APN Outdoor’s suite of digital products.
The judging panel was chaired by Colenso’s Nick Garrett and included Damon Stapleton (DDB), Richard Thompson (Contagion), Phil Clemas (APN Outdoor) and Sanjay Manandhar from Boston-based digital software developer Aerva who were tasked with cutting down the entries to six finalists who were to present their campaign.
The finalist teams included reps from DDB, Us&Co, OMD and Contagion, who were invited to pitch their ideas with a slot of just three minutes.
Dellabarca and Richard’s campaign aimed to put a face to a statistic to humanise it and make it more relatable.
DDB’s Nick Dellabarca and Liz Richards with APN Outdoor’s Phil Clemas
Their idea was to turn digital billboards into memorials for real men who have died from preventable illnesses, as recently as that day.
Every three hours the creative would change to represent a different man, reflecting the shocking frequency of these deaths.
The image would appear in two panels, the first showing an image of the recently deceased, stating his name and cause of death and the second panel revealing a message, prompting other men to start making positive changes in their own lives today.
As well as picking up the prize to head to SXSW in Austin, Texas Dellabarca and Richards also get travel costs and accommodation for two as well as $500 spending money as well as their campaign being granted $100,000 worth of APN Outdoor’s media space to bring the winning campaign to life in 2016.
Dellabarca said: “It’s a great prize for an even greater cause.”
Us&Co’s Carbines and Felix who won the highly commended and people’s choice award took home a $500 travel voucher and a Canon digital camera.
Us&Co’s Aaron Carbines and Mike Felix with APN Outdoor’s Phil Clemas
Carbines and Felix’s campaign aimed to raise awareness about the fact that men don’t tend to do anything about their health until negative symptoms appear, but by the time symptoms do show up it’s often too late.
With lung health being one of the main predictors of life expectancy they decided to focus on how lungs can be given an age, which doesn’t always correspond to the amount of candles on your birthday cake.
The result was a slideshow of sorts, where men could measure their health right there and then on the spot through a breath test.
The ideas from the six finalists can be seen here.
An APN Outdoor release says the subject matter ranged from heart-string tuggers to tech-savvy concepts and given the teams were only briefed last week, APN Outdoor were overwhelmed with the response from the market and the calibre of submissions received.
APN Outdoor general manager Phil Clemas said: “We had high hopes for the competition, but have been truly blown away with the entrants’ final artwork. The process of judging was challenging, with so many campaigns demonstrating the vastly untapped potential of great creative executions in our digital environments. The concepts truly embraced the medium’s unique attributes of immediacy, contextual relevance and integration and we are very excited to share them.”
