As a guest contributor for The Gunn Report, Y&R NZ’s managing director James Hurman looked for the campaigns that had hit the ‘high water mark of human achievement in creative communications’ by winning both Cannes and Effie golds. And just nine campaigns joined this exclusive club in 2012.
Following on from Colenso BBDO’s place atop the agency rankings of the Big Won report—and the individual nods for its staff members Nick Worthington, Levi Slavin, Simon Vicars, James Tucker and Jae Morrison in the creative director, copywriting and art direction categories—a new update to the list has added the world’s most awarded planners, planning directors and suits. And, not surprisingly, Colenso staff again featured prominently, with the agency’s ex planning director and now Y&R NZ managing director James Hurman named as the number one planning director in the world.
Beating out the world’s biggest agencies, Colenso BBDO’s stellar 2012 on the awards front means it has topped the charts of The Big Won report, which calculates global agency rankings based on awards performances. And it’s the first time a New Zealand or Australian agency has ever won the title.
Last year the token Kiwi at Special Group did the campaign for our Axis Awards, revealing to us that we’d won “the most Cannes Lions per capita of any country in the world in 2010 – one Lion per 155,989 people. Sweden was second with one Lion per 202,173 residents. The ‘we invented advertising’ UK? A sorry 4th with one Lion per 849,886 people. The creative powerhouse of the USA? 8th buddy, 8th! with just one Lion per 2,287,003 people. Yesiree.” So, as another of the tiny handful of New Zealanders working in New Zealand advertising, I felt a sense of duty to follow in Tony Bradbourne’s footsteps when Patrick Collister, editor of Directory magazine and The Big Won Creative Rankings, sent me his 2011 data.
If you thought ad agencies were only in it for the accolades, then the Directory Big Won may lend a little bit of credence to that, because it’s an award show that gives out awards to agencies that have won the most awards. How post-modern. Anyway, after the numbers were crunched, DDB New Zealand and Colenso BBDO were the only two agencies from the Asia Pacific region to make the top 20 list for 2010, ranked as the 18th and 20th most successful creative agencies in the world respectively, the first time either agency has made the list.