Booze, sex and sailor talk carried the day at the 56th installment of the Connecticut Ad Club Awards, held in May in Plantsville.
Colangelo was the top Fairfield County-based agency in the annual competition, winning 11 Connecticut Ad Club awards in all including two “gold” awards; while Dallas-based TracyLocke led all agencies with a local office with a dozen citations, three of them gold awards.
Agencies and companies submitted 440 entries for the 56th installment of the Ad Club Awards, with 90 submissions receiving awards.
Darien-based Colangelo won four awards alone for various campaigns on behalf of Diageo PLC, a liquor company that has its North American headquarters in Norwalk. Separately, Colangelo was cited for a campaign to promote “The Book of Beer Pong,” written by Ben Appelbaum and Dan DiSorbo; and ads for Trojan condoms sold by Church & Dwight Co. Inc., among other work.
TracyLocke, a Dallas-based agency with a Wilton office, received three gold awards, winning for its “Lipton pyramids” magazine ad for the tea-maker, with the slogan “changing the shape of tea; its “drink up, rock out” integrated campaign for Purchase, N.Y.-based Pepsico Inc.; and under the business-to-business posters category recognizing its “Join the Playstation Nation” campaign for Playstation.
As the case with Colangelo, the Norwalk-based agency Milk received four citations recognizing its work with a single advertiser: in it”™s case, with Danbury Volkswagen.
In a few instances, advertisers found the winner”™s circle for work hatched on their own without agency assistance ”“ for instance, the Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Norwalk won for its “Healthyville adventures in nutrition” program.
Zemoga, a New York City-based ad agency with a Wilton office, won best of show for a “viral” video campaign that amusingly depicts a world in which individuals follow the rules of Twitter ”“ limiting sentences to 140 characters while keeping up with “trending” topics. The punch line has office workers repeatedly concluding their allotted 140-character limit with a lewd or suggestive word, only to continue the thought with a new “tweet” to form an otherwise innocuous word from the objectionable word.
“This was one of those things you see, and you think to yourself, ”˜Why didn”™t I do that?”™” the judges wrote in their review of Zemoga”™s campaign. “Then you immediately send the link out to everyone you know, hoping to at least get the credit of introducing it to everyone first.”
Separately, Zemoga received a “gold” award for its “rock the cheez” integrated media campaign for Wise Foods and its “Cheez Doodles” brand.
The viral video campaign was executive produced by D.J. Edgerton, a Wiltonite who is co-founder and CEO of Zemoga. Dan Licht was creative director of the production, with Gino Tormac the copywriter and producer.
The video rocketed to the top of You Tube searches for four days, winning the agency a large dose of mostly free publicity. As thanks to the judges, Edgerton arranged for them to receive giant speech “bubbles” they could hold over their heads.
“You really can”™t set out to do a viral video,” Edgerton said. “The whole thing cost us $6,000. We couldn”™t believe it ”“ it wasn”™t for an ad client, it was just a goof.”
