BRUSSELS - The award season has kicked off in style for Saatchi & Saatchi Brussels with a major win at the AMMA Awards, as well as having their youngest creatives scoop "The best Young Creative Team in Europe" award at the Newspaper Association's Best Yet final.
AMMA (Annual Masters of Media Awards) is the most important media award event in Belgium, and the agency's 'Litter' campaign for Fost Plus, Belgium's waste collection & recycling authority was awarded "Best Creative Use of Media".
Litter was literally transferred onto different media by placing it on TV indents, magazine articles, city guide posters, websites, and during TV and radio ads. This meant they had to convince each media partner to go along with this "out of format" concept - not an easy task, requiring a lot of asking, pushing, asking again, convincing, pushing a bit more... until the desired level of media creativity was reached.
After the ceremony, the agency received 3 totally different reactions from Belgium's media owners. The media they worked with were proud they did so. Those who were not willing to work with them for this campaign regretted their decision and promised to be more cooperative in the future. And those they didn't contact for this campaign asked why and were already checking for a future partnership...
Saatchi & Saatchi Brussels CEO, Marc Michils said, "We see this award as an important award for future campaigns and for future media partnerships. It is the cherry on the cake for a campaign that required a lot of meticulous planning and negotiating, and in the end brought us the best result we could have hoped for."
At the same time, the European Final of the Newspaper Association's Best Yet Awards for young European creative teams was taking place in London. The final was attended by teams from all over Europe, along with creative directors from major agencies.
Saatchi & Saatchi Brussels was represented by Ross McCurrach and Arnaud Bailly, who had come through the Belgian National round to win selection to the final. Competing against the crème de la crème of European advertising teams, they took it a step further and won the title of "The Best Young Creative Team in Europe".
Competitors were asked to create a newspaper ad for an association called Room to Read, which instead of giving one off solutions to the third world, teaches them to help themselves. Ross and Arnaud's winning idea was to create a campaign where the solution was to make the news.
Creative Director Jan Teulingkx said of the win, "We are extremely proud and are looking forward to seeing many great things from them in the future."