If you are wondering why the Roger Garlick Awards are now part of the MOST Awards, read on.
Incorporating the Roger Garlick Award (RGA) into the MOST Awards makes the event on 6 September arguably the biggest, most important media event on the calendar.
It seemed like the most obvious marriage, says Lyn Jones, Johannesburg chairperson of Advertising Media Association of South Africa (Amasa), which launched the RGA in 1999.
“This is the first time the Roger Garlick Award is housed within the MOST awards. The RGA, which encourages the symbiotic relationship between media planners and media owners in their quest to create innovative and effective campaigns, complements the MOST awards perfectly,” says Jones.
Amasa approached Sandra Gordon, The Media publisher and chief executive officer of Wag the Dog, which launched the MOST Awards four years ago, about this marriage. “Amasa felt that MOST presented a perfect fit for their award. After all, the objectives of the RGA and MOST are both to promote and acknowledge excellence in this industry,” says Gordon.
“The MOST Awards’ guiding principle is to ensure that the initiative results in greater professionalism in the media industry and improved understanding of their crucial role in the allocation of marketing budgets. Together, both awards celebrate the collaboration between all stakeholders within the advertising media industry.”
Gordon says she strongly expects this event to become the media event of the year. “Each award adds further credibility to the other and we will attract media agencies, owners and clients. This constitutes the chain of interaction and is important to each group.”
Gordon says she considered this alliance for a long time before agreeing to it. “I did not want to have a mass of awards and a ceremony lasting hours on end,” she says. Gordon was very happy with how it was working out. “The RGA will be special, but not take too long, and it is also carefully judged, giving it respectability.
“We also moved to a venue that holds 900 and that adds significantly to our influence in the sector. The RGA has also upped its game with a new judging panel,” she says.
The RGA was started in 1999, as an Amasa initiative, and aimed to acknowledge innovative media planning, encouraging media planners to raise the bar through creative thought and media planning. This needs to be achieved by collaborating with media owner partners to achieve superior results for clients. The awards were named after the late Roger Garlick, who died tragically at the pinnacle of his media career. He embraced the notions of media innovation and creative media strategy and was recognised for his pioneering efforts in this field.
The awards are open to all parties involved in the use of media for advertising purposes, within South Africa, such as: advertising agencies, media agencies, clients/advertisers, and media owners. There will be only one main Roger Garlick Award. The entry and judging criteria are based on the Cannes Lions criteria. The judges this year are Heidi Brauer (ex Comair), Howard Fox (GIBS), Serame Taukobong (MTN), Aline Sciarappa (FNB), Ryan Williams (Cinemark and Amasa), Ludi Koekemoer (AAA School of Advertising) and Nazeer Suliman (Unilever). The judging process will once again be chaired and monitored by Frank Tilley.
Previously winners include Ogilvy Johannesburg (2010) and Carat Media, with Trigger, and Vizeum in 2011. n
