The world is coming to an end: Emojis are here to save us

Published 14/11/2016 by

A roundup of the most important news of the week in the advertising awards world.

Twitter Awards

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it will launch its own advertising awards competition. No one was surprised there as its main competitor Facebook already has its own awards scheme. But people were still waiting to see what exactly constitutes a best-in-class social media activation run on Twitter.

As usual, coming from Twitter, details about the competition were murky. No jury list was even released publicly.

This week, the winners of the inaugural Twitter Awards have been announced. We learned that only a hundred of campaigns were entered in the competition and 15 operations were being rewarded.

Nonetheless, the list of winners in each of the five categories (Live, Impact, Scale, Creativity and Customer) seems competent enough. Winners come from established brands, like Apple and Airbnb, and creative agencies, such as Ogilvy & Mather, Razorfish, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne and TBWA\Chiat\Day.

And because this is Twitter, the awards ceremony was shown live online. Who watched it ? They got the rapper Vic Mensa to freestyle the winners.

The question now remains to see if Twitter is committed to its awards competition and if there would be another edition next year. This interrogation is valid, especially given the fact that COO Adam Bain is leaving the company.

Big Winners of the Week

“The Field Trip To Mars” for Lockheed Martin by McCann New York won two Grand Prix at the LIA Awards 2016
“The Next Rembrandt” for ING for J. Walter Thompson won a Grand Prix at the LIA Awards 2016

And Also

Call for entries for the ADC Awards 2017. Enter now.

Call for entries for AdFest 2017. Enter now.

The shortlist is out for the Epica Awards 2016. View it here.

Story of the Week: EmojiCon

As counter-programming done at its finest, this week saw the launch of the first-ever conference in San Francisco about … emojis.

This seemingly innocuous subject managed to attract dozens of speakers from companies like Google, Kik, Baidu, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and serious sponsors, such as GE, Adobe or ESPN.

Not everyone seemed happy about it:

Finland was a major partner of the conference as the Nordic country is lobbying to get an official emoji as a symbol for its country. Finns have selected four contenders: sauna, fuzzy socks, heavy-metal headbanger or girl flexing her muscles.