Bridget Jung’s One Show Interactive Jury Diary

Bridget Jung was a judge on the prestigious 2015 One Show Interactive jury which met this month in San Diego. Here is her report on the experience, exclusive to Campaign Brief.

It’s been an amazing few days judging The One Show interactive here in San Diego. We stayed at a Country Club about 20 minutes north of the city.  I should have picked up on the golf theme on arrival when I saw the bellboys in kilts. Apparently the resort has one of the best golf courses in the world –  shame I don’t play golf.  There’s a military base not far from the resort and the jury quickly got used to the sounds of the fighter jets flying overhead. The noise didn’t seem to bother the ducks who were happy to float about in the pool. 

It’s been inspiring to see the range of work out there and discuss it with such an interesting and talented group of individuals.  We were a jury of 15 people from across the globe, making for a great mix of experience and opinion in the room. With some pretty big names in our group it was refreshing to see that egos were left at the door and each individual was focused on celebrating the best ideas in the business. 

The One Club CEO Kevin Swanepoel kicked things off and explained the judging process.  One key difference was the absence of discussion or debate before judging each piece. This is done to keep things democratic and avoid any political lobbying to move work up or down. We could ask questions or give insight if necessary, but we were asked to trust our fellow judges and vote by secret ballot as we each saw fit. The final results are not known to the judges – so that means that we will find out who won what on the night.

The One Show receives more interactive entries than Cannes. The preliminary judging was intense, and each judge had over 400 entries to review before arriving. This resulted in an initial shortlist of around 200 entries to be judged in San Diego. Our job over the three days was to decide if each of these entries deserved a pencil, merit or no award (generally 5% of entries are awarded).

The lunch breaks were a welcome opportunity to absorb as much sunshine as possible after too much time spent in a dark room reviewing case studies. It seems that croquet & golf go together. Each day we would break for lunch on the croquet green with a pretty amazing view of the golf course. It looked a little too good to be true (somewhat like the fake backdrop in The Truman Show).

After watching hundreds of case studies, it’s nice see an entry in interactive that doesn’t need a 2 minute video to explain the idea. The unskippable pre-roll ad from Geico doesn’t need any explanation as to just how great it is.

One of my personal favourites was the Under Armour work with Gisele Bündchen – I will what I want. The full case study is not online but you can see links to the different parts of the project.

In addition to judging the web category we also judged intellectual property. It was interesting to explore this relatively new space and see the range in IP agencies are developing from the super low tech Rag Bag to hi-tech smart chopsticks created by Baidu (which can analyse food to tell you if the food is safe to eat).

The San Diego Ad Club invited us for drinks on the Tuesday night. Some of us were tricked into giving an informal presentation, which turned out to be over 100 people expecting value for the tickets they had purchased to hear us talk. The crowd was lovely and forgiving, and we managed to get through the night.

After judging the 200 entries, we were ready to debate and discuss the Best in Show nomination and Green Pencil nomination on the final day.  Each jury can nominate one entry – which will then be voted on by the 115 judges across all categories.

After some healthy discussion we decided on our nomination and then celebrated the end of judging with the other juries (Social, Mobile and UI/UX). Our barman Sergio did a great job keeping the margaritas and wine flowing. As well as leaving San Diego inspired by the work and with some new friends, I also leave knowing that there’s a nudist beach not far from the resort.