The Digital Loeries 2010: Unpacking the Winners

So the Loeries weekend has come and gone – apart from the hangovers being nursed across Cape Town and Joburg this morning. And the Digital Awards, handed out on Sunday night, have also now officially been released on the Loeries Website.

As one of the judges this year, I was privy to the inner workings of how the winners were chosen, and it seems only appropriate that I share some of my views and insights on “the whole shebang”.

Firstly, it’s important to remember that the Loeries is unashamedly about rewarding creativity; that all-consuming, over-used and oft-criticised word that is presented as the visage of the advertising world. Watching the new season of Mad Men in the midst of awards season is almost required viewing as you see the phenomenon that is modern-day advertising as it came into being.

For this reason, and particularly in digital, The Loerie Awards are often maligned as rewarding flashy nonsense that sells nothing. This is nothing new to digital – for years, agencies have snuck around the rules by flighting obscure TV ads at 3am on Sunday night merely so that they qualify.

Still, there is something perhaps particularly egregious about winning awards in a medium that is so much about measurement and results, for doing things that don’t achieve either.

A note on the judging process: The filter judging process takes place remotely, and then the, approximately, 15 judges meet for a day in Cape Town to vote for the winners. It’s a secret ballot (run using iPod Touch technology) so the winners are not known on the day of voting, and the ability to influence winners is fairly minimal.

Now, to the winners.

Gloo

Once again, Gloo Digital Design had a strong showing last night. By my count, they walked away with 10 Loeries in one form or another.

Unlike last year, where many of the awards for Gloo were concentrated on their Wicked Pixels entry, this year showed a wider spread. Among their winners were rich media banners for BMW and TopTV, Magic Moments (their hilarious campaign for FIFA), and several winners in the viral category, including the Lovebirds campaign for Woolworths and the video-based PUMA work.

Gloo has shown a relentless ability to turn the judges heads at awards. And this year is no exception. The quality of the work remains high, the company is masterful at selecting and entering pieces, and has an instinct for pleasing audiences.

Whether these campaigns are achieving meaningful results remains an open question. Takeover banners that can be megabytes in size and require severe fiddling with sites to run them are controversial. But there is no arguing with the results that Gloo and its clients achieve during award ceremonies.

Hello Computer

If you’re looking for compelling craft in digital, the name Hello Computer will be in the top few without doubt. Mark Tomlinson runs a crew of talented designers and developers that produce eye-popping work time and again.

Unlike the flurry of full service agencies on the boil at the moment (my own, Native, included), Hello Computer appears to be sticking to what it does best: acting as a powerful production house for top quality animation, design and games.

The entry this year for Continental (the Power of Stop) is a brilliant little online game that rivals some console games I’ve seen for its graphical execution.

How a specialist agency like Hello fits into the emerging digital agency landscape remains to be seen. Will they be acquired by some hungry agency group? Or attempt an ambitious merger like Native has done (with Quirk, perhaps?). This is all random speculation, but after this year’s awards, Hello Computer is looking like the hottest independent digital specialist around.

Pixel Project

If there’s an outsider in this very inward-looking industry, it’s Preston Thomas. And if there’s anyone whose work stops you in your tracks, it’s this tiny business that is pushing multimedia and digital beyond imagination. The incredible interactive displays that Pixel Project has pulled off in several museums is so different from what almost any other digital company is doing, it deserves to stand alone.

The gold awarded to Preston this year is so well deserved that I personally voted for a Grand Prix. It’s work that, perhaps, has little or no bearing on the future of digital or the larger online trends, but its contribution to South African innovation and pushing us to think differently is value in itself.

The Others

A string of other agencies showed up this year, though there were few surprises. Stonewall+ took a single bronze, which we in the Native group are feeling proud of, if a little disappointed by; Quirk earned a silver for the Harry Potter Twitter campaign; while AquaOnline almost managed only one bronze this year; and then there is Cow Africa, Mesh, Etiket and a handful of others, each picking off a single award here and there.

Closing Remarks

In general, I think the quality of the work was middling this year. Although there is fantastic craft out there, and our design and animation studios can stand up to the best in the world, we lack conceptual thinking and associated great ideas. Very few of the entrants exhibited any kind of real conceptual strength. Those that did were rewarded for it, but comparing ourselves to some of the big winners at Cannes remains a depressing, and inspiring, exercise.

I doubt whether any single winner of the digital Loeries this year will be remembered or shown the way that the ubiquitous Nike Chalkbot or VW piano stairs have been. We remain, for many complex reasons, a minor footnote on the international digital stage. And even locally, is there any campaign we can point to that had the impact online comparable with the Allan Grey TV ad that swept the boards for King James this year?

We’ve all got a job to do in upping our game. For everyone except Gloo, they are the target. But that’s thinking too small. As an industry, we need to be chasing the RG/As of the world. That’s the great challenge before us.

The Bookmark Awards are next on the calendar and with a much greater focus on results, we can hope to see a very different view on the industry through its lens. That said, I still expect to be disappointed.

If the medium has come of age, it’s time for agencies – and clients – to find the courage to grab what it their due.