These awards have a powerful influence on overall trends in mobile and how mobile is perceived within the marketing mix. As a global body, the MMA SA has been instrumental in spearheading, advising and recognising mobile-fronted creativity and results-driven success for many years. Our African demographic and handset population landscape is rich and diverse. This has required our mobile awards to be judged by industry leaders that truly understand the complexity of our ecosystem and the importance of effectiveness of the entries. Unsurprisingly, many of the South African finalists have gone on to win important categories worldwide in the past.
While global success is exciting, the greatest success we have to celebrate lies in addressing our unique local challenges through innovative but contextual use of technology. I have always maintained that the so-called ‘first world’ has always had it so easy with the rapid adoption of smarter and forgiving handsets. Here in SA we have so much more to think about when crafting solutions and campaigns, which truly speak to our market. This requires diverse but expert knowledge of our available technologies that span from the dumbest of phones to the smartest. Creativity blossoms when coherently translating brand messaging and engagements through less graphic-based media such as USSD and PCMs. I believe this makes our African mobile leaders among the very best in the world.
As a jury, we approach the judging of the
Smarties™ entries in this spirit of impact-driven communication. Global judging guidelines include factors such as strategy, execution, creative and of course the results. While we use those as a base, we are really looking for excellent use of the channel(s) that prompt and encourage engagement but, more importantly, have demonstrated successful fulfillment of the client’s strategy and goals. We are also not looking to award work that is expected as the norm. Instead, we wanted to recognise successful campaigns and executions that really have stood out from the clutter of South African consumers’ everyday lives.
Once the entries were shortlisted (and this year it was shortlisted down to over 60 entrants in the various categories), the entries and all supporting documentation are distributed to the 16 judges. This year, we had an incredible team made up of the 'who’s who' of digital, mobile, research and brand leaders. Each judge is asked to comprehensively investigate each entry and mark them using the base criteria we give them. Through this process, we start to see which are the frontrunners in each category. We then all met at Google’s head offices for a full day to bring together all of the ‘hard’ scoring and turn that into true debate.
This resulted into further investigation and discussion as a large group and the use of a full democratic process as to how each category is awarded (if at all). This process was repeated once all the judging and awarding was complete, to ensure that all 16 judges were in agreement with regards to the winners of each award. The process gave rise to some fantastic heated, as well as highly insightful debates as all angles of agency, brand, analytics, technology and research were covered by our judging panel. This process was harsh and clinical, but ultimately fair, which gives me utmost confidence that all Smarties™ 2016 winners have been awarded for the right reasons.
As chair, it was important to contextualise the judging this year, as many of these judges adjudicate at a global level for a variety of awards where brands fully integrate digital and mobile into everything they do from day one. This naturally leads to smoother and more successful executions, as well as budgets that are far bigger. In South Africa, our brands and clients are unfortunately not there just yet. While we ensured that we judged within this understanding, the entries we received were of an excellent standard and actually captured so much of what we look for both locally and globally. As a panel, we felt that some categories were a little lacking, but we are confident that our industry will be doing much better work throughout this next year.
This year’s crop of entries revealed some exciting trends in mobile. The range of medium and technologies used has become broader, and executions are growing more creative in their adaptation across the technology channels. It was great to see more use of video as well. Creative adaptations are still being toned down to users of feature and lesser phones, but this is being done without compromising the messaging of the brand. In almost every entry, we saw a true understanding of the real world bandwidth usage and affordability as well as social and technical limitations of the target markets, which were catered for in the campaign.
Uniqueness was not lacking either, with some entries transforming the everyday into truly innovative and engaging campaigns and pieces of work. Judging from this year’s entries, there is no doubt that South African mobile is growing in confidence and creativity, allowing us to speak to our markets authentically and truly connect.
For more information, visit
www.mmasmarties.com.