Another International Award!

The Francomedia mailbag arrived yesterday with some great news; an announcement from the Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals... we won a Platinum Ava Award!

The international Ava Awards recognizes outstanding work by creative professionals involved in the concept, writing, direction, shooting, and editing of video production, tv commercials, news, and programs, as well as new media.

In our case, we won in the new media category of "Web Development and Interactive Contests" for our work on the "Experience the Node, Alternate Reality Game (ARG)". The platinum award is the top honor.

The ARG that we developed along with our client, The Node Gaming Centre, has won top honors in the MarCom awards as well, so we can now say that it was a multiple award winning promotion!

Developing an ARG is an arduous task, it takes many hours of planning and many more in execution, in all nearly 500 hours were put into making the game a success internationally. The team working on this project, which included members of The Node as well as Francomedia, developed 4 videos that were placed on YouTube as part of the game, as well as 6 web sites, a forum, a database and used multiple social medias, forums and communication methods to both tell the story and execute the game (YouTube, Flicker, Facebook, Craigslist, UnFiction, IRC, blogs).

The ARG was developed to launch a new LAN Gaming Centre in Calgary last summer, the ARG created a buzz, garnered some traditional media attention and gave The Node a very cool story to tell as their brand grows and expands.

Just for the record, here are the hero's that worked on this project (alphabetically):

Sandor Fekete
Ryan Ferrier
Kevin Franco
Kaya Konopnicki
Dave Kromand
Tim MacRae
Colin Stange
John Thomas

So, to everyone who worked on this project, a great big thank you - it took a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work.

International Award Winners!

We did it!

Francomedia picked up 3 awards at the Hermes Creative Awards, an international advertising design competition put on by the Association of Marketing and Communications Professionals.

Here are the details:

2009 Platinum Hermes Award for Design and Concept of Business Cards
2009 Gold Hermes Award for Design and Concept of Envelopes and Custom Stamp
2009 Honorable Mention for Production of "Our Method" Streaming Video

It was great to be acknowledged in an international competition, especially taking top honours for the design of our very unique business cards. What makes this especially gratifying is that every all of our employees were involved in the process, with each staff member designing their own card - this truly was a team effort.

We posted our stance on Advertising Awards a while back... in that article, we mentioned that we would not enter client material into these types of awards as they are not measured on results. However, winning advertising awards on our own materials shows clients that we are capable of award winning creative and doesn't take our focus off their projects.