Lovie Award winners including Sophie Wilson and Edwin Broni-Mensah discuss why they won and share 2015 insights
“The spirit of The Lovies is amazing, it’s inclusive and incredibly broad and not just for an industry clique,” remarked Nik Roope jury chair of the awards ceremony which is now in its fourth year.
Drawing inspiration from The Webby’s, The Lovies is the only pan-European Award to honour the entire breadth of content created for the internet.
Speaking with The Drum on the night of the winner’s party (video above) Roope commented: “It takes a while to build the momentum and get people to warm to the awards and get them to understand what we’re here to do. It takes time to build a brand, get people interested and attract entries. You also have to build equity in the trophy so that it means something to clients and the industry and it carries some weight but that’s really beginning to kick in now in a big way.”
Receiving special achievement awards on the night were Jamie Oliver (Lovie Person of the Year), Sigur Ros (Lovie Artist of the Year), Dan Howell (Lovie Internet Video Person of the Year), Sophie Wilson (Lovie Lifetime Achievement) and Edwin Broni-Mensah (Lovie Emerging Entrepreneur).
Taking some time out to speak to The Drum at the winner’s party (video above) Wilson deemed the accolade “an award for a 30-year overnight success.”
“It really salutes all the teams that I’ve worked with over the years to design lots of things...Being a creative individual and working with creative people you have a career full of having fun and getting paid for it so it’s always the problem that you’re working on right at that moment that has your interest,” she said, adding that if she could offer one piece of advice to anyone looking to emulate her success it would be “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”.
“Failure teaches you a lot but ignorance is bliss. If when we sat down someone had told us it’s really hard to design a microprocessor and you probably shouldn’t try we might have given up but we had the mistaken belief that it might have been quite easy so we went on and tried to do it, and did.”
Other award winners to speak to The Drum (video above) included Kevin Yuen, head of practice at Detica Creative; Xavier Barrade, creative lead at Google Creative Lab and Thomas Pries, creative director and partner at Konstellation who shared their thoughts on where online content is headed in 2015.
“We’ve had a lot of content published by companies that people haven’t trusted for a long time and it’s been very one directional...now there’s a need for our entire industry to be more trustworthy and make sure the content reflects that,” said Yuen. “2015 will spur a lot of people onto thinking how content can be more personalised and trustworthy as well as relevant to them.”
Pries added: “User generated content is the really cool part of content and it’s much more valuable for a brand as it’s not the brand speaking it’s the user and that will be a big trend for next year.”