The 2011 Cincinnati Addys (the Cincinnati Advertising Awards) took place this past Saturday at the Carnegie Arts Center in Covington, KY. This event showcased and recognized some truly amazing work. If anyone doubts that Cincinnati is home to top-notch creative companies and is thus a global hub for consumer marketing, then the work on display at the Addys would have gone a long way in erasing those doubts.
Mike Zitt from Mike Zitt, Inc. deserves a round of applause for making the event a success. As the 2011 Addys Chair, Mike was responsible for everything from encouraging Cincinnati’s advertising community to submit their work to planning Saturday’s event. Submissions to the Addys competition have been on a steady decline over the past several years, but to Mike’s credit that trend was reversed this year. Attendance was another success for the 2011 show. I’m not sure what the final attendance number was, but I didn’t see any empty seats at the Carnegie on Saturday. The venue was filled with an energetic crowd and there seemed to be more inter-agency mingling than in years past.
This success was due in no small part to the eclectic mix used to encourage submissions and attendance – including the Creatives for Creative Creative rallies that were held outside of various agencies in the fall. Web videos produced by Seven/Seventy-Nine were also a part of the mix and it should come as no surprise that the remainder of this email will be about the role those videos played in promoting the 2011 Cincinnati Addys. When Mike approached us about using video we were on board without hesitation. After all, the role of video in general and web video in particular is tantamount to gospel here at Seven/Seventy-Nine.
The first video was emailed to the advertising community in the fall of 2010. This video featured Addys host Brandon LeBeau taking the viewer on a tour of the Carnegie and giving them a taste of what to expect. The next video went out just after the first of year. It provided a behind-the-scenes look at the Addys submissions and judging processes while also reminding people that the Addys were fast approaching. The final series of videos went out one-a-day during the week of Addys. These videos provided tongue in cheek advice from Brandon on topics ranging from what to wear to the Addys to how to get to the Carnegie Arts Center. The overall affect was a certain energy and buzz about the 2011 Addys. The tone of some videos suggested a lighter and more laid back affair than a stuffy black tie awards show while others suggested a fun, energetic, and contemporary event. The goal was to get people excited in advance of the event and based on Saturday’s crowd I would say it worked.
Video is a very affective way to spread a message because people are, by nature, visual communicators. Reading and the written word are relatively recent developments in the grand time line of human history. Literacy and the written word have only become available on a mass scale in the last few centuries and for centuries prior to that reading was reserved for the wealthy and the ruling classes. People communicated by seeing and hearing for thousands of years. Video, and the ease with which it can be shared on the Internet taps into this fundamental human characteristic.
People are hard-wired to watch things. That very fact is why video screens are everywhere these days. You’re sitting in front of one right now and your cell phone can most likely double as one. They’re in cars, grocery stores, elevators – I have even seen them in bathrooms above the urinals. Video alone isn’t going to make or break a marketing campaign but given the power of the medium and the numerous options for distributing video, it’s definitely something that should be in the mix.
