Rob Banks’ Caples Awards Diary: Day 2

Rob Banks, senior creative at DraftFCB, Auckland reports from the Caples Awards in New York, exclusively for CB.

I start the day on my knees, scrubbing beer stains out of the carpet in my hotel room (note to self: don’t use the hotel furniture for opening bottles). A short while later I’m in a cab out front trying to give the driver the address for 74 Mercer, the judging venue. It plays out like this:

Me: “74 Mercer, thanks.”

Him: “Madison, you want Madison Avenue?”

Me: “Nah, mate, Muurrrsah.”

Him: “Madison?”

Me: “Nope, Muuuurrrsaah.”

Him: “Madison?”

(At this point I hand him a print-out with the address on it).

Him: “Oh, you mean MOYce-aah.”

Another high-speed cab ride later, I’m shovelling down bagels and coffee at the newly-renamed 74 MOYce-aah. There, after getting the low-down on the whole Red Socks-versus-Yankees rivalry from a hard-core Bostonian, the publisher and editor of the UK’s Directory magazine – Patrick Collister – arrives with free copies of his magazine for us. Free stuff. Cool.

Right, back to work. Gary the chief judge outlines to us that today is less about discussing work as a group, and more about marking work individually. 1-10 for the idea, and 1-10 for the execution. Sounds simple enough. And it doesn’t involve scrubbing hotel carpets.

The long walk to Judging Group Five’s table takes me past the stands displaying the work that’s still in the running after yesterday’s orgy of elimination. What’s left is mostly good, though I’m thinking maybe some entries really belong in the ‘crate of shame’ in the corner.

Our first category of the day is Agency Self Promo. Choice. But first up, and limping out of the gate, is a DM piece for an Irish agency. It’s the old ‘book full of blank pages’ idea (the ‘swiss army knife’ of the DM world…well that and beer glasses with taxi phone numbers on the bottom). “Can we mark things zero?” “No.”

No book shenanigans in the next entry. But there is fun with fonts. It’s a job ad for a US agency looking for a designer, which was cleverly placed where most designers spend a lot of time – the digital font sites. There, somewhere between Din and Franklin Gothic Bold was an all-new font – the sample text being the headline for their ad. Phew.

Then it’s invasion of the Proxybots. They’re a team of people with live-feed GoPro cameras strapped to their heads who attended the seminars of your choice at a big digi-interactive expo thingy in the States. Using Twitter, clients could instruct them where to go and what to do (no mention of increasing the size of their logo though).

For much of the time, there’s no clear and present danger of anyone’s one’s socks being blown off. So, we rip into Print. Another limper swiftly dies a single-digit death. But then of all things…a simple, fully formed idea. And beautifully crafted it is too. It’s a print campaign for a kids’ non-sting anti-septic, which features some gorgeous 3D illustration work. But there’s no phone number, URL, nothing. Disqualified. Oh, no. This is starting to hurt.

The hurting stops in Online Advertising. AT&T’s ‘You’ve got a case’ is a Facebook app that plugs the contents of a kid’s profile info into a courtroom-style argument as to why their parents should get them a 4G Smartphone – complete with a fully personalised pree-zentation from a hilariously slick ‘Facebook Attorney’. In a courtroom. With a judge. Yessss.

Hot on the heels of that is AT&T’s ‘Brackets by six year-olds’. Working off the idea that non-sporting, non-expert people are supposedly better at picking the outcomes of multiple sporting fixtures (brackets), it features a series of half-time interviews (shown online and on TV) where six year-olds dish-up their views on how well particular teams will do. Or not. I laugh. Other judges laugh.

This is more like it. The Direct Response TV category yields an ad for incontinence pads where they talk NFL players into wearing them on the field. Potentially funny and good. Butnot. Unlike the full-length version of the State Insurance ‘Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride’. And of course Pak n Save’s ‘Meet the meat of your dreams’.

But then things get a bit weird in the all-new (and massive) Digital Content category. The IBM Centenary is a massive, sprawling project – with three movies directed by Oscar-winning directors. It’s epic. Literally. And yet the entry leaves me cold. As does the entry for Siemens ‘Somewhere in America’ – another epic project, with content featuring the Obamas for chrissakes. Big-budget, big-brand project after project rolls by and I’m actually getting a bit bored. But I don’t want to be. And then I’m not.

It’s a piss-simple, low-budget ‘brand experience’ for Belgium’s Foundation Against Cancer. To demonstrate the aging effects of over-tanning in young women, they invited five young couples on a free, beachy holiday somewhere – and secretly invited the girls’ mums too. After equipping the bedrooms with infra-red cameras, and after the guys were asleep, the mums took the place of the girlfriends in bed. Cue footage of blokes freaking out when they wake up next to someone who’s twenty years older than the person they went to bed with.

To coin an oft-used phrase from our Planning Deparment, ‘what learnings can I take from all this?’

Well, simple (nearly always) works best. But opening bottles of beer on hotel furniture doesn’t.