Indonesia’s Citra Pariwara 2014 sees Lowe named Agency of the Year and Leo Burnett awarded Digital and the Media Agency of the Year prizes
Lowe Indonesia came away with the Advertising Agency of The Year award at this year’s Indonesian Citra Pariwara creative awards, held last Friday in Jakarta.
Citra Pariwara is the longest running creative festival in Indonesia and it concluded with a bang, and quite a few surprises. This year’s theme “Return on Idea” has the ambitious goal to show that creativity and measurement do not need to be at odds, but in fact can support each other. There is no effectiveness without strong creativity, and a strong creativity needs data-driven insight and measurement.
“We are proud to bring this theme because it brings all kinds of agencies and also client to the discussion table”, said Irfan Ramli, President of Association of Advertising Agencies Indonesia-Jakarta Chapter.
Lowe Indonesia’s Agency of The Year award was engineered with two Best of Category wins – in Film and Print.
Lowe’s powerful “Tree of Life” short film for Lifebouy Soap easily swept the Best of Film award. It features a story of a rural mother who so cherished a tree because it was planted at the same time as his baby was born, the custom for a newborn in that village. Unfortunately the child died due to poor hygiene.
The message came from Lifebuoy who champions for better hygiene in underdeveloped rural Indonesia.
Lowe also won Best of Print with a clever demonstration of the power of Pure It, a water purifying device from Unilever (pictured right).
Leo Burnett also had a great night, snatching the Best of Radio with a hilarious campaign for Neo Hormoviton, an adult male stamina enhancer. The campaign shows hilarious scenarios of wives permitting their husband for silly feats, such as buying a counting horse and shooting movies with porn star, thanks to the effect of the product.
Leo Burnett also won 2 Gold for Digital category (Community Applications & Social Media Campaign) with BloodBook, a Facebook app that helps users become and look for blood donor for and from their own friends, a real solution where Indonesians struggle to find blood donors (pictured left).
Lo Sheung Yan, President of Jury, commented on this year’s entries, “I’m very confident that the work that wins here stand a good chance of winning in the regional or even the global award shows”
But Citra Pariwara has another surprise. Last year, Citra Pariwara added Media Agency of The Year and Digital Agency of The Year categories to the existing Advertising Agency of The Year. The intent is to recognize all the expertise within the industry, including Media and Digital agencies. To many people’s surprise, this year’s Media Agency of The Year and Digital Agency of The Year were both won by Leo Burnett, previously thought to be a “conventional” advertising agency. This shows how the expertise lines are blurring, and how a traditional advertising agency can evolve to respond to changing communication landscape.
Lowe Indonesia won the Agency of the Year title from runner up Leo Burnett, Berakar Komunikasi was 3rd, Fortune Indonesia and Publicis Indonesia were 4th and 5th.
Leo Burnett won Digital Agency of the Year from Berakar Komunikasi, BBDO Indonesia, Narrada Communications and Lowe Indonesia.
Unilever was named Advertiser of the Year.
“I believe this year’s result will excite the advertising industry future even more. It is not what your agency is known as: advertising, digital, or media, that matters. It is what you put on the table that matters: a strong idea that moves people”, said Lulut Asmoro, the Chairperson of Citra Pariwara 2014 and also CEO of JWT Jakarta.
A national advertising festival now in its 27th year, Citra Pariwara aims to raise Indonesian advertising standard into international standard. Hence, the panel of jury consists of international names from different backgrounds, such as Lo Sheung Yan (Chairman of Worldwide & APAC Creative Council JWT, Shanghai – pictured left), Kalpesh Pantakar (Regional Creative Director, Y&R, Dubai), Rene E. Menenez (Chief Executive Officer, Better Digital Solutions, Malaysia), Minoru Fujii (Executive Creative Director, Hakuhodo Inc, Japan), and others.
2-day Seminar on the theme was also held, featuring prominent speakers from creative, media, brand and research backgrounds. Some of the international speakers are Mark Chamberlain (Managing Director, Millward-Brown Indonesia), VJ Anand Siva Subramaniam (Executive Creative Director, TBWA Malaysia), Richard Nicoll (Chief Shopper Marketing Officer Saatchi & Saatchi), and many others. The topics revolve around how effective research can help, not kill, great ideas, how technology helps deliver faster response to fine-tune execution, and how insightful creativity can bring business impact. Gina Wibowo, former CMO of Bentoel made an inspiring session with an important message for all: Effective and impactful ideas need both highly creative agencies and courageous clients.
This year’s Citra Pariwara was also unique because of the Presidential Election held 4 months earlier. In the hottest political event this year, a lot of digital campaign ideas were put to action. From social media movement, co-creation of content, to viral meme, Indonesian advertising landscape had never seen a level of engagement as this year. This was reflected in many entries for the award, as they saw in large number of political campaign entries and winners.