ANA Honors Blue Shield of California, McDonald's, Energizer for Best Multicultural Advertising-AdAge
McDonald's Snags Multicultural Award at ANA Conference
Blue Shield, State Farm, Dentyne Also Among Winners
By Laurel Wentz
Published:
November 18, 2008
BOCA RATON, Fla. (AdAge.com) -- One of the most multicultural -- and most applauded -- winners at the Association of National Advertisers' Multicultural Excellence Awards was a general-market spot for McDonald's Corp.
Manny Vidal, President-CEO of The Vidal
Partnership, briefly donned Miss USA pageant winner Crystle Stewart's sash in
the spirit of the fun evening.
The ANA gave out six awards at the Nov.
17 dinner at the group's annual Multicultural Marketing conference, attended by
more than 300 people, at the Boca Raton Resort & Club in Boca Raton, Fla.
Winning
attitude
The McDonald's commercial quickly cuts from one
kids' sports team to another at the end of a game, featuring a sequence of
ecstatic and somewhat smug winning teams waving trophies and downcast losers.
That all changes suddenly when the losing teams begin waving bags of food that
have just arrived from McDonald's. The McDonald's spot, featuring kids of all
colors and ethnicities on a variety of teams, won in the general-market
category.
Tony Suarez, McDonald's VP-multicultural marketing, said the
spot was done by DDB, Chicago, with input from Hispanic shop Alma DDB, Coral
Gables, Fla.
The Partnership for a Drug-Free America won in the
African-American category for a spot for by Prime Access, New York, in which a
young girl in a tough urban neighborhood raps about a guy who does nothing but
get high. The idea behind the spot, said Howard Buford, president-CEO of Prime
Access, was that nobody wants to be that kid who's going nowhere. Mr. Buford was
also honored at the AdColor Award show held here on Sunday
night.
The prize for best advertising in the Hispanic category went
to Blue Shield of California, for a campaign done in-house about Blue Shield's
ability to provide Spanish-speaking doctors. The spot, which also won a Bronze
award at Advertising Age's Hispanic Creative Advertising
Awards in September, features a woman who accompanies her Spanish-speaking
mother-in-law to the doctor and deliberately twists his instructions in
translation so the mother-in-law will stay home on bed rest.
A campaign
for State Farm Insurance, by InterTrend Communications, was awarded in the
Asian-American category.
Vidal wins digital
award
In the new digital category created this year, the
winner was an online effort by the Vidal Partnership, New York, for Cadbury's
Dentyne gum that echoed the brand's up-close theme with a vertiginous dive
through a colorful landscape that ricochets closer and closer. Accepting the
award from the evening's host, Miss USA Crystle Stewart, President-CEO Manny
Vidal briefly donned Ms. Stewart's sash in the spirit of the fun evening and
explained that his digital creatives could have come along to explain the
intricate and mesmerizing online work if he hadn't cut their travel budget.
Mr. Vidal said afterward that the Dentyne campaign was notable because
it was built around digital, print and radio, with no TV. The print work was a
winner at the Ad Age awards.
The final award, for a campaign with
significant results, went to Energizer and Hispanic shop Grupo Gallegos, for an
online and TV idea that demonstrated the way Energizer batteries go on and on by
commissioning three Hispanic singers or bands to write and perform the longest
song of their career. The songs were posted to Energizer's Sigueysigue.com ("On
and on"), where visits far exceeded expectations.
Winners were chosen by
the ANA's multicultural marketing committee.
