It may seem amusing to non-industry people, but there is in fact an annual awards ceremony for the best ads and design work produced here in South Australia each year. This year’s black tie event was held at the Stamford Grand with several hundred of the industry’s best and brightest in attendance.
The awards are hotly contested amongst the various ad agencies and design houses with bragging rights, and a fair smattering of publicity, up for grabs. Adelaide has three major ad agencies but this year’s awards ended up being a bit of a two horse race with Clemenger and Jam fighting it out for top spot. In sheer numbers, you’d have to say Clems came up trumps with nine awards, but Jam weren’t far behind with seven. Jam also managed to pick up the ‘Gold Chair’ – the award given to the single most outstanding piece of work on the night – for their slow motion sneeze ad for the Department of Health. So perhaps it might be more of a draw.
A special mention needs to be made of the 6 awards received by Adam Johnson. His one person company left its mark alongside the heavyweights of Clemenger and Jam.
In the design arena, Voice were a clear winner with five awards with Parallax, Gavin Klose, and Black Squid also in the winners circle.
This year’s Chairman of Judges was the art director responsible for Queensland Tourism’s world famous ‘Best Job in the World’ campaign, and he spoke very highly of the calibre of work created here in Adelaide in the past 12 months. It was a refreshing change from the generally luke warm reception and distinct lack of awards the work has received over the past few years.
Somewhat surprisingly, no single piece of photography was deemed worthy of an award despite their being seven finalists.
NOTE: Glam Adelaide’s website was a finalist for best HTML/CSS website!
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