The APAC Effie Awards has announced its winners at the first physical ceremony for three years. There were 62 Effie winners – 1 Grand Effie, 11 Golds, 28 Silvers and 22 Bronzes.

• Ogilvy Mumbai won the Grand Effie for Not Just A Cadbury Ad 2.0, a platform which brought together the star power of Shah Rukh Khan and hyper-personalisation martech to enable thousands of small retailers to create personalised ads with Shah Rukh Khan as their ambassador.

• Agency Network of the Year went to Ogilvy with 4 Golds, 5 Silvers and 7 Bronzes.
• The Womb Communications was crowned Independent Agency of the Year, a first for the Indian agency.
• Mondelez International won Marketer of the Year, with its brands Cadbury, Kinh Do Mooncakes and Oreo contributing points towards the win. Cadbury also walked away with Brand of the Year.
• Australia topped the leaderboard by country, with 20 winners, followed by India with 13 winners and Singapore with 6 winners.

The heartfelt win of the year went to Publicis Groupe Vietnam. The agency won its first-ever Effie (a Silver) for Keep Stories Alive, created for Mondelez Kinh Do mooncakes and was the only winner from Vietnam this year.

“Winning an Effie is a testament to how our creativity truly solves business problems. Mondelez is one of our biggest, most creatively ambitious clients, and this campaign delivered real and measurable business results. We are thrilled to celebrate this awesome achievement,” stated Kate Bayona-Garcia, chief executive officer, Publicis Groupe Vietnam.

The Silver-winning campaign was created by Publicis (creative), Spark (media) and Digitas (data). It started with a challenge, Vietnam’s Trung Thu mid-autumn festival was losing its spirit, becoming more of an obligation than an opportunity to connect with family under the moonlight. The partners found a way to trigger nostalgia by magically bring old family photographs to life using deep learning artificial intelligence from D-ID, a leading technology company based in the United Kingdom and Israel. The Kinh Do Trung Thu platform made it possible to see your ancestors smile, blink and turn their heads as old photos came to life, reliving family memories in the midst of a lockdown. It reached 47 million users, created 420 million impressions, while animating more than 186,000 faces and doubling online sales targets.

“The mid-Autumn festival is about coming together, celebrating together and sharing our stories. The Kinh Do brand stands for preserving and cherishing the traditional culture of Vietnam and being the connection between past, present, and the future – that was the objective of Keep Stories Alive. Congratulations and cheers to the Publicis-Mondelez partnership and to the entire Mooncake team on this recognition,” stated Sameer Yadav, director – marketing, Mondelez Vietnam.

2022 Awards chairwoman, Nicole McMillan, commented, “Winning an Effie is a monumental accomplishment. Not only is it testament to the exceeding amount of effort and talent from the teams, it is also affirmation from their peers that they have delivered exceptional results and brought success to their brands. Only the most effective works get rewarded with Effies, so congratulations to the teams on their well-deserved wins.”

The Special Awards are given out based on the total calculation of points accumulated by each winner and finalist.

This year’s Special Awards winners are:

The full list of winners can be accessed here. All winners and finalists will be accorded points towards the 2022 Effie Index, which ranks the most effective agencies, marketers and brands globally. The Index will be announced in 2023.