Cresta Awards handed out just three Grands Prix in its 30th year, showing the rigour of its judging and its determination to be one of the most desirable and hard-to-win creative awards in the world.
BBDO Canada, Dentsu Creative New York and Havas Paris took the three top positions that the Cresta organisers applauded as “outstanding projects and big ideas that challenge, deconstruct and redefine media.”
The Grand Prix winners were:
● Missing Mateoka by BBDO Canada for Muskrat magazine. This re-telling of the ‘Pocahontas’ story delivers an alternative soundtrack to synchronise with the movie of the same name. First Nations’ people rewrite the story as one of ‘kidnapping, rape and murder’.
● Scrolling Therapy by Dentsu Creative New York for Eurofarma. An app that uses the phone camera to motivate and train Parkinson’s sufferers to perform vital facial exercises.
● Anne de Gaulle by Havas Paris for Fondation Anne de Gaulle. A massive integrated week-long awareness-raising intervention that temporarily renamed the city’s Charles de Gaulle airport after the iconic French leader’s daughter, Anne, who was born with Downs’ Syndrome.
37 golds, 38 silvers and 79 Bronze trophies were also awarded, with many new first-time winners among the recipients.
All winners can now be viewed here.
Cresta is unique in how it judges, taking the votes of its 120 jurors, who all work in isolation, and mathematically averaging to produce the scores. This system, and the semi-permanent jury, aims to apply a consistent and impartial grading from one year to the next.
“This year’s voting saw our jury once again come through with a no fear or favour approach,” stated Lewis Blackwell, chief executive officer of Cresta. “There are slightly fewer Grands Prix because that’s what their expert collective intelligence determined. There is a strong range of work across the gold, silver and bronze, and it is remarkably diverse in the categories that are being awarded. We have an absolute standard and the votes’ tally doesn’t mislead. It is what the grand jury honestly and expertly concluded, without any bias or pressures to conform. That’s perhaps also why we see some surprise newcomers and other trends across the winners.”
Among agencies with multiple awards were Serviceplan/Plan.net (last year’s overall network of the year), BBDO New York, Impact BBDO Dubai, Havas Paris, Saatchi & Saatchi ME, MullenLowe MENA, Dentsu Inc. and a strong performance across several of the Dentsu Creative network offices.
Cresta was founded in 1993 and exists solely to encourage, discover and reward standards in creativity. As part of Creative Standards International, it is a sister organisation to the world’s leading creative publication, Lürzer’s Archive.
