Rob Banks’ Caples Awards Diary

Rob Banks, senior creative at DraftFCB, Auckland reports from the Caples Awards in New York, exclusively for CB.

DAY ONE: In a show of national pride I start the day Hobbit styles. Which means Double Breakfast. Eggs Hollandaise at the hotel – and after a scary-ass high-speed cab ride from mid-town to SoHo – bagels with Kwaafee.

74 Mercer, the Caples judging venue, is one of those typical vast, high-ceilinged, slightly shabby-chic New York loft spaces. I half expect Tim Gunn to appear and instruct us to ‘make it work, people’.

Thankfully he doesn’t. Instead, Gary Scheiner from digital shop Rosetta – and chief judge – talks us through the rules of engagement. Basically, it’s ‘abstain from judging your own agency’s work, tell us if you think something’s in the wrong category’…yada, yada.

Right, to work. Crikey, there’s a lot of it. Over 700 entries in fact. Only it’s not laid out on miles of trestle tables like most other award gigs. Here, the boards are velcroed to exhibition stands. If they’re still up there at the end of the day, they’re through to Round Two tomorrow. If they’re not then, well…they’re not.

The good news is, our group is judging Ambient and Guerilla. Excellent. Now obviously I can’t tell you here what passed and what failed because they’ll send Bruce Willis and helicopters – and I’ll be picking up the soap in Rykers Island quicker than you can say ‘call me Dolores’.

So instead, here are some of my personal highlights and lowlights. After an hour or two of some pretty average work, a ‘take one’ flyer for a Swiss Tattoo expo catches my eye. It also catches my nose because it’s tattooed onto decomposing pig skin…well pig flesh really, about half an inch thick. To take the details you have to literally tear a chunk of flesh away. Apparently, these things were nailed to trees in one of Basel’s grungier ‘hoods. Nice.

Less impressive – and also from Switzerland – was some toilet bowl stickers with a nasty brown smear on them saying something about ‘shorter skidmarks at Tire Joes’. Yikes.

Then the V-Motion Project pops up and I feel a sudden surge of national pride. This surge turns into something moderately less enjoyable when some Austrian ambient for a taxi firm hoves into view. Yep, you guessed it…it’s a phone number printed on the bottom of a beer glass. Surely there should be something in the rules about these by now?

That pleasant surge returns with the ‘Pedigree Donation Glasses’ entry. Cinema-goers that donate to the Pedigree Adoption Drive on their way into the movies are handed some yellow glasses to wear while watching a movie about an abused dog – which has a happy ending. Non-givers are handed a different set of specs and see the same movie, but with a very non-happy ending. It’s then I notice the hard-boiled Italian-American sitting next to me suddenly has something in his eye.

Then, late in the day, something a wee bit dangerous and nasty disrupts the orderly flow of the sensible, solid and safe across our judging table.

It’s a stunt for German beer brand Sternberg – the choice of hard core activists and public agitators apparently. In a defining moment of lunacy, their agency used an ex-Polizei riot squad van to serve free bottles of Sternberg to a large gathering of their target market. Not in the beer aisle at a local supermarket of course, but in the midst of an angry public demonstration – and right under the very unimpressed noses of the van’s previous owners.

There’s brave. And there’s stupidly brave. I’ll let you decide where to sit on this one. I’m off to the Royalton for a cup of tea and a lie down.

DAY TWO: I start the day on my knees, scrubbing beer stains out of the carpet in my hotel room (note to self: don’t use the hotel furniture for opening bottles). A short while later I’m in a cab out front trying to give the driver the address for 74 Mercer, the judging venue. It plays out like this:

Me: “74 Mercer, thanks.”

Him: “Madison, you want Madison Avenue?”

Me: “Nah, mate, Muurrrsah.”

Him: “Madison?”

Me: “Nope, Muuuurrrsaah.”

Him: “Madison?”

(At this point I hand him a print-out with the address on it).

Him: “Oh, you mean MOYce-aah.”

Another high-speed cab ride later, I’m shovelling down bagels and coffee at the newly-renamed 74 MOYce-aah. There, after getting the low-down on the whole Red Socks-versus-Yankees rivalry from a hard-core Bostonian, the publisher and editor of the UK’s Directory magazine – Patrick Collister – arrives with free copies of his magazine for us. Free stuff. Cool.

Right, back to work. Gary the chief judge outlines to us that today is less about discussing work as a group, and more about marking work individually. 1-10 for the idea, and 1-10 for the execution. Sounds simple enough. And it doesn’t involve scrubbing hotel carpets.

The long walk to Judging Group Five’s table takes me past the stands displaying the work that’s still in the running after yesterday’s orgy of elimination. What’s left is mostly good, though I’m thinking maybe some entries really belong in the ‘crate of shame’ in the corner.

Our first category of the day is Agency Self Promo. Choice. But first up, and limping out of the gate, is a DM piece for an Irish agency. It’s the old ‘book full of blank pages’ idea (the ‘swiss army knife’ of the DM world…well that and beer glasses with taxi phone numbers on the bottom). “Can we mark things zero?” “No.”

No book shenanigans in the next entry. But there is fun with fonts. It’s a job ad for a US agency looking for a designer, which was cleverly placed where most designers spend a lot of time – the digital font sites. There, somewhere between Din and Franklin Gothic Bold was an all-new font – the sample text being the headline for their ad. Phew.

Then it’s invasion of the Proxybots. They’re a team of people with live-feed GoPro cameras strapped to their heads who attended the seminars of your choice at a big digi-interactive expo thingy in the States. Using Twitter, clients could instruct them where to go and what to do (no mention of increasing the size of their logo though).

For much of the time, there’s no clear and present danger of anyone’s one’s socks being blown off. So, we rip into Print. Another limper swiftly dies a single-digit death. But then of all things…a simple, fully formed idea. And beautifully crafted it is too. It’s a print campaign for a kids’ non-sting anti-septic, which features some gorgeous 3D illustration work. But there’s no phone number, URL, nothing. Disqualified. Oh, no. This is starting to hurt.

The hurting stops in
Online Advertising. AT&T’s ‘You’ve got a case’ is a Facebook app that plugs the contents of a kid’s profile info into a courtroom-style argument as to why their parents should get them a 4G Smartphone – complete with a fully personalised pree-zentation from a hilariously slick ‘Facebook Attorney’. In a courtroom. With a judge. Yessss.

Hot on the heels of that is AT&T’s ‘Brackets by six year-olds’. Working off the idea that non-sporting, non-expert people are supposedly better at picking the outcomes of multiple sporting fixtures (brackets), it features a series of half-time interviews (shown online and on TV) where six year-olds dish-up their views on how well particular teams will do. Or not. I laugh. Other judges laugh.

This is more like it. The Direct Response TV category yields an ad for incontinence pads where they talk NFL players into wearing them on the field. Potentially funny and good. Butnot. Unlike the full-length version of the State Insurance ‘Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride’. And of course Pak n Save’s ‘Meet the meat of your dreams’.

But then things get a bit weird in the all-new (and massive) Digital Content category. The IBM Centenary is a massive, sprawling project – with three movies directed by Oscar-winning directors. It’s epic. Literally. And yet the entry leaves me cold. As does the entry for Siemens ‘Somewhere in America’ – another epic project, with content featuring the Obamas for chrissakes. Big-budget, big-brand project after project rolls by and I’m actually getting a bit bored. But I don’t want to be. And then I’m not.

It’s a piss-simple, low-budget ‘brand experience’ for Belgium’s Foundation Against Cancer. To demonstrate the aging effects of over-tanning in young women, they invited five young couples on a free, beachy holiday somewhere – and secretly invited the girls’ mums too. After equipping the bedrooms with infra-red cameras, and after the guys were asleep, the mums took the place of the girlfriends in bed. Cue footage of blokes freaking out when they wake up next to someone who’s twenty years older than the person they went to bed with.

To coin an oft-used phrase from our Planning Deparment, ‘what learnings can I take from all this?’

Well, simple (nearly always) works best. But opening bottles of beer on hotel furniture doesn’t.