WINNERS: Jed Cohen, Adam Rosenberg team up.
It ADDYs up
World's largest ad competition
attracts alumni, professors, students
Each year, many of the College’s alumni, professors and students enter the world’s largest advertising competition, the America Advertising Federation’s ADDY Awards.
Adam Rosenberg, ADV 2004, and his Miami Ad School classmates Jed Cohen, ADV 2005, and University of Montana-Missoula graduate Matt McFaden recently won Best of Show in the student category at the local and district levels for a Ziploc campaign. “It’s awesome to get an award like this in such a fierce industry,” Rosenberg said. “Creating great ads isn’t work for me; it’s pleasure.”
The ADDY Awards are so big, it’s difficult to keep track of how many of the College’s alumni, professors and students participate or win. Entries begin at the local level – the AAF’s 200 member clubs. Best-of-Show and gold-award recipients progress for free to the organization’s 15 districts. Silver-award recipients have the option of paying their entry fee into the next level. District finalists are entered into the national competition. Eighteen-hundred of this year’s 58,000 entries advanced to the national level. “Our three-tier system is why the ADDY Awards are so prestigious,” said the AAF’s vice president of public affairs, Mary Hilton.
Justin Kramm, ADV 2000, a copywriter at AKQA in San Francisco who works on advertising Xbox360 online, recently won gold at district in the professional category for his Bide-A-Wee (Scottish for stay-a-while) pet-shelter campaign. It gave him “confidence that what you’re doing is good,” he said. “You can get hired without winning the awards. But it makes the process a lot easier.”
Kramm won one gold and two silver National ADDY Awards in the student category – for campaigns for The Toy Museum, Sci-Fi.com and Five Vintners (a winemaking company), respectively. His Sci-Fi.com campaign idea came from his disappointments in the 21st century. “We don’t have flying cars, alien friends, or robot maids,” he said. “This ad is for people who want to fly to the supermarket for milk.”
Rosenberg and Cohen chose Ziploc because of the challenge it posed. “All these ads show happy moms with their happy kids handing them happy little sandwiches,” Cohen said. “We thought maybe we could do something cool with it.”
They showed healthy food, like a stalk of broccoli, “behaving badly” – for instance, flashing elderly women. The campaign’s tagline? “Don’t let food go bad.”
“When we came up with the idea, Adam just kind of paused and looked at me and said, ‘That’s it, that’s huge,’ ” Cohen said.
They had little time to work on it because of their heavy school workload.
“We didn’t have a winter break because we were working on the ads,” Rosenberg said. “The afternoon school got out for break, we went to the market and shot pictures of vegetables.”
It’s a tough industry, Kramm said. “You can’t bore people into buying something; you have to make it interesting. Our society has A.D.D. They are distracted by their cellphones, computers, iPods, videogames, etc. We need to entertain them or they will ignore us. That challenge inspires me to do better and better ads.”