DDB celebrates double ahead of World Effie Festival

Singapore - On a night where the Institute of Advertising Singapore (IAS) announced that Singapore would host the inaugural World Effie Festival in early 2008, DDB Singapore came away from the Effie Singapore awards with two gold medals.

The announcement was made to the press earlier in the day and then again during the awards show, outlining the objective of the World Effie Festival to be a global event dedicated to understanding, inspiring and celebrating creative effectiveness in communications.

"If Cannes is about celebrating creativity with an eye to effectiveness, the World Effie Festival will be about celebrating effectiveness, with an eye to creativity," Stephen Mangham, chairman for World Effie Festival Supervisory Board and group chairman for Ogilvy & Mather Singapore said.

According to Mangham, the festival, which will bring together an estimated 2,000 professionals from the advertising and marketing industries around the world, will look to make Singapore a permanent venue hoping that this would provide greater "stability" and "longevity" to the event. Singapore has already been confirmed as the host for the second instalment of this global awards show.

The festival would bring globally-recognised leaders in communications and related fields to discuss how to deliver and measure creative effectiveness, and will include the first ever Asia Pacific Effie Awards. This award aims to recognise effective marketing communications campaigns and is open to winners of national Effie awards from Singapore, China, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, as well as entries from other countries around the region which do not yet host national Effies, such as Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The jury will be made up of leading industry figures from the five national Effie awards affiliated markets.

At last nights Effie awards Singapore, DDB Singapore walked away with gold medals for its ‘Because you deserve' StarHub campaign, and ‘It's all in the details' campaign for the Singapore Air Force. The third gold medal awarded that evening went to Eleven, for its Carl's Jr campaign titled ‘It's gonna get messy'.

"We're a very happy agency and somewhat relieved. We've shown that highly-creative work goes hand in hand with hardworking results. We are thrilled for our clients, and hope more will take to the Effies," David Tang, president and CEO for DDB Singapore said.

This year there was a total of 107 submissions which was an increase of 16% from last year - 40 entries made it into the finalist category. DDB Singapore also finished the night as the biggest winner with two gold, three silver and three bronze.

"DDB likes the Effies. I think all the serious marketing clients are into this sort of creative work. Agencies don't need to do scam ads. It's time we were more like a London with real ads, than a Phatpong with scam ads," Tang said.