J. Walter Thompson Jakarta wins Agency of the Year at Indonesia’s Citra Pariwara 2015 awards; Leo Burnett named Digital Agency of The Year
Indonesia’s Citra Pariwara 2015 awards and festival was held late last week, culminating in the awards presentation on Friday night. The big winner proved to be J. Walter Thompson Jakarta with Leo Burnett, Hakuhodo and Lowe also doing well.
In the major awards J. Walter Thompson was named Agency of The Year, while Leo Burnett Indonesia retaining their Digital Agency of The Year title, and Group M Mindshare won Media Agency of The Year. These final awards concluded the whole Citra Pariwara festival, a 3-day event that had began on Wednesday.
J. Walter Thompson dominated the creative awards picking up all four of the Best of Category awards handed out on the night. The agency’s “Last Minute Souvenir” campaign for Angkasa Pura won two Best of Category Awards in the Non Conventional and Direct Promotion categories. Their other two major Best of Category awards went to the Nikon Indonesia print ad “Waterfall” in the Print and Out of Home categories. The two campaigns also won five Gold awards between them.
Leo Burnett Indonesia won three of the four Golds awarded in the Digital category, including two for Samsung “Keeper Alert” .
The oldest creative festival in Indonesia, in its 28th year Citra Pariwara continued to elevate the country’s creative standard and sought bright new young talents. The creative competition encompasses 13 categories, from print to film craft, and the newly added Design category. Panel of jury consisted of local and international creative figures. Elvis Chau from Anomaly Shanghai, Hiroshi Hori from Hakuhodo Asia Pacific, Jaswinder Kaur from Carat Indonesia, Hendra Lesmono from Bates CHI Indonesia, and Hoh Woon Siew from Hakuhodo Asia Pacific presided the judging panels. The international judges also included JoJi Jacob (DDB Singapore), Damisa Ongsirlwattana (O&M Thailand), Carlos Camacho (Lowe Vietnam), Fumitaka Takano (ADK Japan), Chow Kok Keong (Dentsu Utama Malaysia) and Hiroshi Hori (Hakuhodo Japan). More than 1,000 entries were submitted into the competition.
On top of creative competition, a 2-day seminar also discussed about the latest on industry trends. Fergus O’Hare (Facebook Creative Shop Asia Pacific), Nanda Ivens (CEO of Mirum Asia Pacific), and Daniel Surya (Group CEO of WIR Group) were some of the prominent industry speakers featured in the seminar. The seminar discussed and questioned certain norms in today’s fast development, like whether branding still makes sense in this era of instant gratification, or whether Facebook is a friend or foe to traditional advertising.
This year’s theme is “Stop Making Sense”, inspired by recent disruptive new “sharing economy” business like Uber or AirBnb that initially did not make sense, yet proved to be brilliant. It was a call to return to the creative child within, unbounded by adult’s norm and “logic”.
“Amidst the new trend of big data, digital measurement, and latest marketing jargons, sometimes we need to be reminded that by being unreasonable, even non-sensical, we can push our ideas to greater heights”, said DD “Lulut” Asmoro, Chairman of Citra Pariwara 2015 committee. “We are also very pleased to see more more participation and quality ideas from our friends in Media and Digital agencies.”.
Resounding this year’s theme, the president of Main Category, Elvis Chau from Anomaly Shanghai also predicted that the agency of future would not make sense to today’s practitioners. He foresaw the reign of freelancers and how “Agencies will be smaller, and the advertising industry that evolved to be more like film industry”.
