ART DIRECTORS CLUB GERMANY
Michael Weinzettl talks us through some of the winners from Germany's Art Directors Club Festival 2012, where Berlin agency Heimat took the most awards.
Video: "CNN Ecosphere" by Heimat, Berlin
Last Saturday I took the train from Berlin - where I live - to Frankfurt (which used to be my home town for 23 years and where Lürzer’s Archive was founded and based until 2001) to look at the advertising work submitted to and exhibited at the annual festival of the German Art Directors Club.
They call their awards Nails and showered a total of 19 gold, 77 silver, and 127 bronze accolades on the submissions this year. Of course there are countless categories, from newspaper design, photography and illustration all the way to things like architecture for events and set design.
I was really only interested to see the winners in the print and film categories as it’s a matter of pride for us at Archive to feature these works in the magazine before they get the nod from the award shows. I really wouldn’t have needed to worry that anything might have slipped past our radar. There were no surprises. Just about all of the award-winning work in print and film on show had been seen by our faithful readers in the magazine first.
Notably, the Grand Prix, which of course turned out to be a digital affair, was awarded to the “CNN Ecosphere” set up for the COP17 Conference in Durban on which, among other features, discussions focusing on the event were visualised in a digital installation via a live Twitter feed. This digital project from Berlin based agency Heimat was one of the 15 top digital works selected for Vol. 2/2012 of Archive by that issue’s guest juror, Jeff Benjamin, and was in effect the big winner at ADC this year.
Heimat also struck Gold with their film for DIY chain Hornbach. We featured that commercial, in which the unexpected arrival of a giant walnut in a shabby village triggers major changes, back in Vol. 5/2011. Yet another Gold went to Heimat for their integrated Adidas “Marathon” campaign, the posters for which could be seen in Vol. 2/2012.
There was only one Gold print ad which had been absent in Archive and for a very good reason. It was conceived by Scholz & Friends, Berlin in memory of what was Germany’s most dearly beloved comedian, humorist, cartoonist, film director, actor and writer, Vicco von Bülow, commonly known under the pseudonym Loriot. Most of his gently anarchic humour derived from problems of communication between individuals, the contrast between the presented situation and the forced dignity displayed by his big-nosed cartoon characters.
Image: Adidas "Marathon" from Heimat, Berlin. ("The fight against pain and the victory of joy. - The face of the marathon")
See the full list of winners on ADC.de.
There is hardly anyone in the German-speaking world who doesn’t know and love his TV skits or movies and hardly anyone outside it who does - which is the reason we didn’t publish the simple ad which consisted of the line: “Dear God, Have fun.” It simply wouldn’t have meant a thing to the majority of our non-German readers. Also, I suspect, the fact that this was really the only Gold winner in Print has as much to do with Vicco von Bülow having been an Honorary Member of the ADC as with the ad’s quality itself. In my opinion, Oliver Voss’s campaign for Rolling Stone magazine (Vol. 2/2012), which received Silver and Bronze, would have been just as deserving of a Gold award in the print category.
A very unexpected and pleasant surprise for us was when, Lisa Wiedemann, a student of the European School of Design in Frankfurt who we had hired to tend to the Lürzer’s Archive booth at the exhibition, turned out to be the winner of a coveted Gold Nail in the ADC’s Junior Awards. Lisa had designed a would-be instruction manual that could be folded out into a map of the engine and placed underneath the hood of an Opel Corsa to guide you when carrying out small car maintenance tasks - like checking or changing the oil, for instance. Our congratulations to Lisa!
Images: Vicco von Bülow [left], "Dear God, Have fun!" by Scholz & Friends [right].
Image: Still Hornbach "Every Change needs a Beginning" by Heimat, Berlin. Subscribers can view the spot here.
