Ogilvy and KFC walked away as the big winners at the 2018 Bookmark Awards, as the former bagged the coveted Best Digital Agency Award, while the fast-food brand was crowned as Brand of the Year. KFC’s Ben Schoderer also won the Best Marketer Award.
The winners were announced by the IAB SA at a glittering event held at the Theatre on the Track, Kyalami last night.
Gold and silver awards
Gold Pixels went to 12 entries, while silver Pixels were given to another 55.
King James took gold Pixels in both the Content Strategy sub-category and Bots, messaging and Dark Social sub-category for its ‘Ukshona Kwelanga’ WhatsApp drama series created for Sanlam MyChoice funeral plans. Showmax was awarded gold in the Data-driven Campaign sub-category for its customer engagement segmentation campaign.
The gold for Organic Search Marketing went to NMPi for its Clicks campaign. NATIVE VML took the Display Advertising gold and the Social Media Publications gold for its ‘Stop the Cycle’ campaign for Huffington Post South Africa. The Huggies ‘Baby Marathon’ campaign won Ogilvy the gold in the Branded Content sub-category and the Internet of Things category. It also won a gold Craft Award for Marketing Copywriting. Ogilvy took a fourth gold for ‘Suppertime Stories’ for KFC in the Innovative use of Media category.
Primedia Broadcasting won gold in the User Generated Content category for the KFM 94.5 ‘What’s up Western Cape’ campaign, while 24.com (a division of Media24) took gold for Special Features for the ‘#GuptaLeaks’ editorial series which ran across News24, Amabhungane and Daily Maverick.
Black pixels winners
Eight black Pixels – Special Honours Awards – were presented. Of these, chairman of the M&C Saatchi Group and Jury President of the IAB SA Bookmarks 2018, Jerry Mpufane says, “The Special Honours categories are very important in that they help celebrate excellence by the marketing professionals, which also serves as inspiration for more great work in the future. The industry needs to do better at identifying and celebrating the professionals who move us forward. Let’s hope 2019 sees more entries in these categories.”
Continues Mpufane: “The Bookmark Awards are an interesting window into modern and cutting-edge advertising. The great brands entered their work, and I know I speak on behalf of the jurors when I say that we saw some worthy winners. The case study entries challenged the way we look at advertising, elicited some heated debates about what works and what doesn’t, and mostly some lessons came out which can be applied into the future – and that’s very exciting.
Digital trends
Artificial intelligence and various uses of the Internet of Things, where networks of physical devices enable these objects to connect and enhance the customer experience, are a key digital trend that marketers need to take note of as they will soon form part of the average advertising campaign plan. But Mpufane explains that the Bookmark judges were not impressed with the fact that fewer, instead of more, case study entries this year demonstrated these technologies.
“Once again we had an incredibly high quality of entries to the Bookmarks and the judges had a tough time evaluating the best of the best. We’d like to thank the industry for their ongoing support and, of course, our sponsors, without which the Digital Summit and Bookmark Awards would not be possible,” says IAB SA CEO Josephine Buys.
For the full list of winners click here.
