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The Drum’s Creative Department unveils the best work of 2015

December 1, 2015 | 6 min read

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It is, perhaps, the very antithesis of Cannes – a small gallery of work, a roomful of people from all walks of the industry, and a decidedly lo-fi roll of stickers for each.

The Drum’s Creative Department unveils the best work of 2015

The Drum’s Creative Department unveils the best work of 2015

Their task? To select the inaugural winner of The Drum Creative Department Live award.

Throughout the year, The Drum features the best creative work in advertising, marketing and design in every issue, as selected by readers’ votes on thedrum.com.

This week it went out on the road – 14 of the best campaigns from 2015 were selected by The Drum’s editorial team and sponsor Workfront – and put in front of an audience for the ultimate vote. Not on the scale of Cannes International Festival of Creativity, of course, but an important creative harbinger nonetheless.

Creative inspiration on the night came from two rousing speakers - Twitter UK’s head of creative agency development Helen Lawrence and Mr President creative partner Laura Jordan Bambach.

Ahead of the voting, Lawrence put some of the campaigns through her unique visibility filter – looking at how they trended on Twitter, and how the Daily Mail (and its readers) judged them. Jordan Bambach, meanwhile, illustrated her three ad trends of the year through her personal stand-out campaigns of 2015 – and declared the business of creativity “back in business”. Roll on 2016.

She says that the year has been one of transformation, from the creative renaissance of some strong network agencies to the rise of new agencies and studios doing “stuff beyond advertising”.

“It makes me excited about the future of our industry after quite a hard five or six years for us all when creativity often took a back seat to efficiencies and economies.”

Simplicity; transparency and more digital, yet more human are Jordan Bambach’s watch-words of the year.

“We went back to basics, but from a different perspective,” she says. “The big idea today comes from a different place and what I’m seeing is not so much creating ‘advertising’ but actually creating experiences that also work as advertising.”

For example, people creating everything from products and feature films to robots and ads with a social, sharing advocacy to them. “We are moving on from complicated ideas that were fussy,” adds Jordan Bambach.

Notable examples include Honda’s collaboration with OK Go! – a beautifully crafted piece of work, created as a one-track shot, and Microsoft Xbox’s Survival of the Grittiest – a live action billboard that featured eight gamers battling it out in extreme conditions to win a Lara Croft-inspired adventure of a lifetime.

Jordan Bambach notes that although artificial intelligence and analytics is changing the way we live and work, it can’t change creativity: “It’s the one thing that cannot replace.” So today’s creative is armed with digital tools like never before, opening up a whole new opportunity to make smart, beautiful pieces of work.

An example is Spotify, which invited people to feel good about their ‘happy forecasting’, asking users to remember how many artists they streamed before the acts made it big. We’re all A&R men now.

Trend three was transparency: social media is growing up. She cites Australian blogger Essena O’Neil as indicative of this – the selfie queen dramatically quit Instagram this year, calling out the fakeness of much social media activity.

Brands who got transparency right this year included PayPal whose online Pole to Pole adventure with Steve Booker saw the vlogger travel from the Arctic circle to the world’s most southern city without spending a physical penny. Honest, transparent and engaging.

Lawrence highlighted the disparity between some of the shortlisted campaigns on her company’s Twitter platform with that of the Daily Mail. “What does visibility really mean?” she asked.

So, while Coco de Mer ‘X’ was lauded on Twitter for its “amazing” art direction, the Daily Mail proclaimed the campaign “the most X-rated ad of all time”. A DM commenter, meanwhile, mused that he would “rather see animals in an ad”.

‘Game of Balls’, a GoT-inspired pastiche to promote testicular health was also “amazing”, according to the critics on Twitter, whilst the Daily Mail was

was decidedly less positive, its commenters bemoaning that this was public service advertising “dressed up as porn”.

And so to the winners. Anomaly London’s Elle UK’s #MoreWomen campaign came top with the most stickers planted, followed closely by M&C Saatchi’s aforementioned ‘Game of Balls’ for The Blue Ball Foundation. Human After All took third place for its ad ‘The Big Reveal’ for BAFTA.

#MoreWomen, Elle’s third annual feminism campaign to demonstrate the reality of the glass ceiling, shows images of women in the most senior positions of business, media and politics with their male colleagues. The men are then removed from the picture, revealing how few women there really are at the top table.

Lawrence said of the winner: “We’ve all seen thousands of graphs showing the gender imbalance within leadership roles. The #MoreWomen campaign images highlight the issue in such a powerful way, creating immediately shareable content to spread the message further.”

A worthy winner amongst a gallery full of inspirational and inspiring work from 2015. As Workfront marketing director, and The Drum Creative Department Live shortlister, Jada Balster concludes: “Across the board, whether you’re trying to market the world’s latest and greatest product or service, or you’re raising awareness of serious charitable and political issues, the quality and creativeness we’ve seen this year is truly exceptional.”

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