By: Ekrem Dupanović
While Printera company is printing the Creative Portfolio 02, which is supposed to be out of the presses on Tuesday, March 12, I’m constantly watching the PDF document of the final version of the book that we’ve sent to the press.
The difference in layout, compared to the previous book, is visible, which makes me very pleased. We went a step forward. Content is great, it features great campaigns, and our sponsors’ ads are very creative.
Unlike the previous book, in this year’s book we haven’t included the ranking of the ten most successful campaigns, agencies and advertisers. Whatever the scoring system we applied, the results did not reflect the actual state of things.
Agencies, such as Agency 101, which in my personal opinion should be among the first three, doesn’t even make it to the top ten. For the days, Asja and I have been trying to figure out why this is so, until we realized a few things.
First, the Creative Portfolio refers to a single calendar year and includes ten national and regional creative advertising festivals in the Adriatic region. It happens – and it was the case in 2018 with The real life escape room, by Slovenian Agency 101 – that an exceptional campaign appears in the festivals only in the second half of the year. Agency 101 launched this campaign just before the jury meeting of BalCannes in September.
It did not appear at the Slovenian SOF Festival, which is held in spring. If it had, it would have scored points that would surely have make it one of the top 2018 campaigns.
This is also apparent from the fact that the second book showcases campaigns that were in the first one as well. They come out in mid or late year and go to festivals that take place afterwards.
Another reason why it may be inappropriate to attribute any points to any of the campaigns is that agencies do not report every campaign to each of the festivals. In 2018, the campaign Catch the Golden Fish of the Communis DDB Belgrade won awards first on BalCannes and then on Sempl, which ultimately brought it many points, and it was not necessary for it to achieve any spectacular success at UEPS.
Some other campaign, such as, for example, the Secret of Brilliant Digestion, gained a spectacular number of awards only at the national festival. But then we don’t see it anywhere else. And yet, it has more awards than several campaigns that have won awards at regional festivals and which, realistically, should be rated as more significant than those awarded by the jury of a national festival.
How to evaluate the prizes won at a particular festival is generally a very tricky question. The only solution is the establishment of a regional The Cup (based on the former Intercontinental Cup), where all the award-winning campaigns from the entire region (in this case from the Creative Portfolio) would go to another top-notch jury that evaluates them according to unique criteria, not taking into account the awards won at festivals during the year.
Only such a jury would be able to say which are the best campaigns of the year in the whole region. Based on the value of awards won before such a jury, we could talk about which agencies from across the region were the most successful.
This year, the race for its own place in the Creative Portfolio will be joined by Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the No Limit Sarajevo Advertising Festival, which will be held in late November or early December 2019.
This is a significant detail, even though BiH agencies can always compete at BalCannes, Golden Drum and Sempl. Some of them win an award here and there, but No Limit will give local agencies in BiH a chance to present themselves to colleagues from the region.
Last year, there were good campaigns in Bosnia, but the agencies did not have the courage to enter them to regional festivals. Only MITA was courageous enough, which landed them a Gold Sempler, for the work on the National Lottery of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Part of the mission of Media Marketing is the development of the advertising market in the Adriatic region.
By reinstating our national advertising festival (No Limit) we will give Bosnian-Herzegovinian business a new chance to catch up with the wave of change and grow into an equal member of the regional communications community.
The way in which Macedonian agencies can be found in the Creative Portfolio remains to be seen, and I sincerely hope we will find a way soon. And this regional The Cup is not a crazy idea by Asja.
A message to agencies and advertisers at the end of this text: take Belgrade agencies as your model (New Moment New Ideas Company, McCann, Communis DDB …) and submit your works to regional creative festivals. We don’t live in the common state any more, but we do business in the common market.
