The World Trade Center in downtown Boston was the hub of advertising action on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009. The 49th Annual Hatch Awards had come to take the night over: advertisers, agencies, professors, and students alike schmoozed and boozed as they celebrated the best of advertising across New England.
The Hatch Awards, put on by the AdClub of Boston, is an annual award ceremony designed to commemorate the Northeast’s most creative, most effective, and most memorable advertising every year.
Outside of the Northeast, the Hatch Awards are barely talked about, but there’s something about having a regional awards show that brings the New England advertising community together.
Boston University advertising senior Peter Hughes said of the show, “Advertising that may not have necessarily been awarded in a national or international awards show, such as Cannes, can finally be recognized.”
Recognized and celebrated. Many of the silver, bronze, and merit award winners hailed from smaller agencies in the New England area, which gave these companies a chance to be honored and distinguished from the clutter that is advertising space.
“There is so much bad advertising out there that you rarely get a chance to really appreciate good, effective advertising.” Hughes remarked. “As you are learning to craft advertising in school, you should take in only the best advertising, not only for inspiration for your work, but to know what has been done. Then, you push yourself to create something that will break through the clutter.”
Clutter seemed to be heavily emphasized in this year’s Awards. Best in Show winner, Fort Franklin, was recognized for the video they produced for the opening of the 2008 Hatch Awards. The four-minute introduction video features the Fort Franklin employee’s Macintosh desktop. It’s simple. It’s clean. Until windows pop up left and right from all the different programs he is using. An iChat pops up with a link to a YouTube video, iTunes is asking to install all updates, the baseball game needs to be constantly checked, the style of voiceover for the ad he’s actually supposed to be working on isn’t right, and the boss interrupts only to see that the employee has nothing done. The message is clear and the tagline says it all, with the music from a variety of Youtube videos and iTunes music colliding with one another: Welcome to clutter 3.0. Here’s to breaking through. Hatch 08.
Bang. Cut to silence. Cut to black.
Fort Franklin captured the essence of the advertising space today: with so many advertisers and venues for advertising emerging, clutter is hard to break up. Just like a laptop desktop may get overwhelmed with the dock icons bouncing and distractions just a glance away, advertising is a space where the consumer is bombarded and inundated with message after message.
Good advertising can break through that. And, effective advertising will get the consumer to pay attention and absorb the information about the product. That’s the kind of advertising the Hatch Awards wants to celebrate.
Judging for the Awards was held at Partners + Simons, an advertising agency in Boston, and there were a panel of nine judges from advertising agencies across the country to review the work over the course of a weekend. Judges included employees from high-profile agencies like Ogilvy, Crispin Porter, BBDO San Francisco, BBDO New York, just to name a few.
Among the gold medalists were Arnold Worldwide’s Barack Obama advertisements, Mullen’s Boston Bruins television ads, Hill, Holliday’s Liberty Mutual television ads, Pod Digital Design’s integrated online campaign for the History Channel.
John Hancock, a Hill, Holliday client for a number of years and counting, won Marketer of the Year, and Best in Show, the ceremony’s most prestigious award, went to Fort Franklin.
The winners all had one thing in common: big ideas spanned across multiple mediums—with a single consistent message.
Liberty Mutual’s agency, Hill, Holliday, for example, won a gold medal award for their national television campaign featuring the Responsibility Project. But the agency also won medals for more than just the television ads. Their microsite, ResponsibilityProject.com revolved around the same concept their commercials did: Responsibility. The online banner ads for Liberty Mutual also won awards. These ads feature campaigns warning consumers about things like being fire smart, and encouraging consumers to vote in contests like Coach of the Year to recognize NCAA coaches who displayed talent and sportsmanship.
A big idea is a start, but clearly consistency is the key to drive home the big idea.
Hughes said, “Almost across the board, [the winning campaigns] were the ideas that make you say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?!’ because of their simplicity and genius.”
The prize is awarded each January for the previous year. Advertising Network
Melody Tran is amazing.