New York’s Advertising Week has many award shows, but beyond the winning hands at the Microsoft Texas Hold’em Invitationals, Wednesday night’s prizes belonged to media, specifically MediaPost‘s Creative Media Awards, held at the historic Yale Club in downtown Manhattan.

This year Canada had four finalist spots in this North American competition organized by Media. All were from SMG, and resulted in a gold Newspaper win for Procter & Gamble Canada’s Swiffer team, led by Trevor Thrun, manager of P&G’s home care division, for the ‘Swiffer Condo’ program done in tandem with Metro.

The Starcom campaign was designed to make urbanites take notice of Swiffer’s easy cleaning ways, reaching them during their commute. The Swiffer ads in Metro popped beyond their parameters by Swiffering away text from adjacent body copy, even clearing a swathe through an editorial spread. They also cleaned up on the buzz front, as well as triggering a 15% purchase intent bump. 

SVP group media director Christine Saunders, who led the initiative (and gave one of the shortest acceptance speeches of the evening) later commented, ‘it’s an honour to win for Starcom Canada on the North American stage.’ The program, which was also helmed by media manager Andria Karabelas in collaboration with Rachel Levy, account manager at Metro, took a finalist trophy in the best media plan category, and the MediaVest Kraft Canada Tassimo program, led by Joy Sanguedolce, also took finalist trophies in the Creative and Consumer Magazine categories (which were mysteriously AWOL from the awards table).

The most wins of the evening (six), including Best in Show, went to Goodby Silverstein & Partners. The overall win was for its Frito-Lay/Doritos ‘Hotel 626’ campaign, a virtual house of horrors built to revive two long-dead Doritos flavours, which also won in Best Online Media: Branding. By enlisting Twitter and Facebook apps, the site lured over four million unique vistors who hung out in the scary hotel for an average of 13 minutes.