ANA Honors Blue Shield of California, McDonald's, Energizer for Best Multicultural Advertising — Ad Age | About the ANA | ANA

ANA Honors Blue Shield of California, McDonald's, Energizer for Best Multicultural Advertising — Ad Age

McDonald's Snags Multicultural Award at ANA Conference

Blue Shield, State Farm, Dentyne Also Among Winners

By Laurel Wentz

BOCA RATON, Fla. (Nov. 18, 2008/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.