Soap takes out first Creative Showcase for 2011 with Foxtel ‘100 Days of Summer’ campaign

Sydney digital agency Soap has snared top spot in the first Creative Showcase for 2011 – the free online digital advertising creativity competition – winning with its “100 Days of Summer” campaign for Foxtel. Profero, in a creative collaboration with M&C Saatchi, picked up second place for its work on Pizza Hut’s “Feed a Friend” campaign and Tequila rounded out the awards securing third place for its work on an augmented reality campaign for Coopers Clear.

The winners, who were chosen by a panel of esteemed industry judges and announced at the Creative Showcase lunch in Sydney yesterday, are showcased here. 

The bi-monthly Creative Showcase series accepts entries for work completed in the two months prior to close of judging for each round.  The winners of each round’s Creative Showcase will gain automatic entry into the 2011 IAB Awards “Best of Creative Showcase” awards.

Mike Zeederberg, MD of Zuni and Chair of Judges for Creative Showcase said: “This round delivered an interesting mix of entries, including viral videos, Facebook give-aways and Augmented Reality Apps. Ultimately though, exciting creativity linked to strong results is what convinced the judges.”

Soap’s winning campaign – “100 Days of Summer” was a social media campaign which rewarded the Foxtel Facebook fans with hot content and exclusive prizes.  Focusing on the Foxtel content that people love enabled Soap to grow the fan base from 25,000 to 100,000 over the 100 day long campaign. Most importantly, the positive sentiment ranking outweighed negative by a factor of 10:1.

The judges were impressed by the campaign noting the many challenges of delivering quality for 100 consecutive days with one commenting: “It looks simple but is a huge effort to maintain the quality of content over such a long period. Well done guys.

The second place was a creative joint effort between Profero and M&C Saatchi to deliver the first Facebook gift you can eat with its “Feed a Friend” campaign. The Facebook app let pizza lovers earn free pizza (via virtual slices) for themselves and to share the love with their friends by offering free virtual slices to be given away to friends via posts on their wall.  More than 45,000 app connections have been made, thousands of pizzas redeemed; and 41,000 stream stories made.

Third place winner Tequila develop an innovative augmented reality campaign for Coopers Clear which was launched just before the Creative Showcase round closed.  With the goal of making Coopers more desirable to women and positioning Coopers Clear as the new innovative beer from the Coopers family, the campaign offered customers a chance to win a clear cut diamond in specially marked packs. Customers simply checked their augmented realty code on the promotion website or via a free iPhone app to see if they had won.  With impressive numbers of applications downloaded in just seven days and numerous mentions on blogs, the campaign seems set to be a success.

The Creative Showcase competition is free and easy to enter – entrants simply register and submit the campaign online at creativeshowcase.net.au