OMD Canada came home from the Canadian Marketing Association’s revamped award show on Friday night with a bag full of hardware.
The Toronto-based media agency won the Best in Media award and a Gold in the Media Consumer Products category for its ‘Battle in a Bag’ campaign for Frito Lay Canada’s Doritos Collisions product, reaching out to young snackers out on the town with interactive projections and ‘SMS throwdowns’ that continued online via real-time updates on a microsite and social media sites like Facebook. The campaign produced 58% brand awareness and 20% trial of the Collisions brand, and drove an 8% share of the category after 12 weeks.
OMD also won a Gold Media in the Retail category for its giant coffee cups and other OOH executions in its ‘Let’s Start Fresh’ campaign for McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada. The agency shared a Bronze Integrated Retail award for the same campaign with Cossette, Watt International and Golin Harris.
DDB Canada swept the night with seven wins for its ‘Sexy Sumos’ campaign for the 2009 Subaru Forester, including Best of the Best award, Best in Advertising, Integrated and Automotive categories, as well as Golds in Digital Automotive and Integrated Automotive and a Silver Promo Automotive. The campaign set out to distinguish the SUV from the ‘sensible, boring’ image in the category with TV, web, print, radio and in-store materials featuring coquettish sumo wrestlers. It resulted in a 132% sales increase during the campaign period vs. a year earlier.
The CMA maintained its focus on results and advertiser-agency collaboration while reorganizing its awards into disciplines – Advertising, Digital, Direct 1:1, Integrated, Media, Promo and PR – and categories – Automotive, Consumer Products, Consumer Services, Financial, Not-For-Profit/Fundraising/Public Service and Retail, and retaining its Lifetime Achievement award, Lettermail award and Student awards. The award itself was also redesigned via a competition; the ‘Ripple’ trophy concept by Direct Antidote was selected as the winner. The Lifetime Achievement award this year went to Cirque du Soleil’s founder Guy Laliberté.
For a list of all 2009 CMA Award winners, please visit The-cma.org/awards.
