The Canadian Marketing Association held its annual awards gala Friday night, fêting marketers who achieved great results with great creative and ideas. The Best of the Best Award was taken by Elections Ontario and DDB Canada, Toronto, for their ‘Engage-the-Vote’ campaign. The Lifetime Achievement Award went to former privacy commissioner Bruce Phillips for helping marketers see that privacy legislation can be good for business. Phillips is the first non-marketer to win the award in the event’s 34-year history. The Directors Choice Award went to Kraft Canada for its ‘seismic’ innovation in marketing. Its ‘What’s Cooking’ campaign made the shift from marketing products to offering food solutions with its what’s cooking magazine, newsletter and Web site. In addition, Kraft achieved a ‘reverse whammy,’ says CMA board chair Trish Wheaton, by rolling the campaign out to the U.S. where it has been just as successful as in Canada.

Stand-out media solutions helped some marketers achieve gold, such as General Motors du Canada’s C-Day – Lancement de nouveaux véhicules Chevrolet, in the Automotive Products & Services category. The one-day launch of five new Chevy vehicles was a blitz of TV, radio, outdoor displays, print and Web. A giant game of hide-and-seek took place in five Quebec cities in which radio listeners were given clues to find five vehicles in life-size versions of car collector boxes. The blitz generated over 6,500 leads in one day. Meanwhile the DRTV category saw Campbell’s Power2Cook campaign take gold for its 60-second Food Network DRTV spots, vignettes on the show Countdown to Dinner and a Power2Cook Web site.