Block’s Feral Beer rebrand and JWT’s ‘Attention Powered Car’ for RAC win trophies at AdFest

Block’s Feral Beer rebrand design and JWT’s ‘Attention Powered Car’ for the RAC were both Lotus winners at the AdFest Asia Pacific awards held over the weekend in Pattaya, Thailand.

Feral won Silver in the Design category which in total saw 1 Grande Award, 3 Gold Awards, 17 Silver and 9 Bronze handed out. There were also 42 Finalists. RAC won in the INNOVA category which only saw 4 trophies handed out.

McCann Melbourne won Silver for Macquarie Dictionary ‘Phubbing’, Leo Burnett Sydney won Silver for Bundaberg ‘Road to Recovery’, Block, Perth won Silver for Feral Rebrand and GPY&R Melbourne won Silver for Australian Defence Force ‘Air Force FM’.

The Jury was particularly impressed by this year’s Grande winner: ‘Mother Book’ by Dentsu Inc. for an obstetrician company called Bell-Net Obstetrics, an exquisitely crafted the die-cut book that depicts the growth of a baby in a womb, page-by-page.

“Good design is good business these days, and that was really evident in the work entered this year – there was a high level of design thinking. As a designer, I felt there was not much ‘pure’ design work entered and I believe this category could be elevated if more design businesses were invited to take part,” says Park.

“We saw a lot of real craft in the work – print campaigns where the image has been created, then photographed rather than computer generated. Realness seems to be a growing trend. Overall, you can see the Japanese have a deeper understanding of design and craft. They were leading on a lot of levels, although there was strong work from other regions,” he adds.

JWT’s ‘Attention Powered Car‘ won in the prestigious INNOVA Lotus category. Awards here are given for outstanding innovation ideas for communication.

Only three INNOVA Lotuses were awarded: RAC’s ‘RAC Attention Powered Car’; Leo Burnett Sydney for Coke’s ‘Small World Machines’; and Dentsu Inc. for Internavi’s ‘Sound of Honda/Ayrton Senna 1989’.

The Grande INNOVA Lotus was awarded to Hakuhodo Inc. for Kirin Ichiban’s ‘The Photogenic Beer’.

“The Photogenic Beer is truly a new product, and product innovation absolutely does propel our industry forward. It is a perfectly simple idea where they take Kirin beer and add foam on top to seal in the coldness for 30 minutes, and it had huge impact in the market,” said AdFest Grand Jury President Tor Myhren, President & Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at Grey New York.

1,095 delegates from 53 cities in total attended AdFest this year, and 3,253 entries were received across 17 awards categories.