The only advertising awards that honor innovation and impact, this year’s MIXX Awards—selected by a prestigious panel of senior executives from brands, agencies and media companies—highlighted the breadth of opportunities as well as the creative revolution that is transforming the way professionals craft and consumers experience advertising. The winners were announced during a multimedia extravaganza hosted by Saturday Night Live veteran Jim Breuer.
“We are witness to an extraordinary moment in advertising,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB and a renowned author and columnist on the marketing and media world.
“Technological innovation in digital media is only one piece of great advertising—nothing beats a story well told, and tonight’s winners show us that there is no medium that can convey compelling narrative across so many platforms, in so many creative ways, as interactive.”
The gala's ultimate honor, Best in Show, was secured by Tourism Queensland and CumminsNitro Brisbane for “The Best Job in the World,” a campaign illustrative of the enormous global impact interactive advertising can deliver when deployed across multiple platforms.
Tourism Queensland, in an effort to drive worldwide awareness of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef, asked CumminsNitro Brisbane to develop an idea that would resonate with people in all countries, crossing cultures and backgrounds. Together they created an international job search to fill the “best job in the world”—an onsite, live-in manager of an island on the Great Barrier Reef. The central component of the campaign consisted of social media, which was integrated with traditional media around the globe and leveraged the potential of consumers’ engagement and their zeal for generating their own content. Potential applicants were asked to create a one minute video and post it to a site where the winner would be selected.
At the end of the campaign, close to 35,000 individual videos from 197 countries were uploaded. On an estimated advertising budget of $1.2 million, the campaign garnered media attention worldwide valued at $165 million.
Tourism Queensland and CumminsNitro Brisbane also won golds in social marketing, direct response and lead generation and cross-media integration.
Another big winner was HBO and their agencies, Campfire, Deep Focus and …and company, for their campaign for the HBO original series True Blood, which took golds in digital integration and product launch. Helping True Blood become one of the year’s most critically acclaimed programs, the campaign drove awareness and tune-in to a series about vampires, a genre that traditionally skews younger. The winning entry created a multitiered promotion that built a story around True Blood characters and enabled a deeper engagement with the show from the outset and built an early and loyal audience among a harder to reach and more sophisticated audience segment.
“This year’s MIXX award winners underscored the increasing significance of emerging technologies and platforms like social media, mobile and the ability to integrate platforms through cross-media integration,” said David Doty, SVP, Thought Leadership and Marketing, IAB.
“It also showcased marketers’ growing sophistication and capacity for creating their own brand destination sites to engage consumers within unique owned environments, providing brands with newfound opportunities to build deeper, exclusive relationships with their customers.”
The MIXX Awards are the only juried advertising competition that evaluates all critical components of the interactive marketing mix, including strategy, creative, execution and results.
Click here to view the complete gallery of the MIXX Winners.
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