What a year for social causes and the communications behind them. A year that no-one could have predicted. A year when change was driven more from the grassroots than by experts at nonprofits. And yet, where communications platforms and ideas still had a vital role to play.
After all, the Arab Spring and occupy movements needed symbols and rallying cries – a simple communication idea like ‘we are the 99%’ had the power to speak a simple truth to millions and unite a movement.
All of this has meant a difficult process for the nominations to the Osocio campaign of the year for 2011. We decided to introduce two new categories, to reward social movements and technological innovations, as well as advertising and marketing ideas.
Another big shift was the move from West to East. This year we saw beautifully conceived and delivered work coming from countries like Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Singapore.
So. These, friends, are our particular favourite campaigns from over 600 amazing blogposts on Osocio in 2011. Stay tuned for the winners.
Jury:
All Osocio bloggers are members of the jury. And we are proud to announce these 15 external jury members:
Guillermo Caro, is an international consultant. He was Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather, founder of Advertisers Without Borders and Ogilvy Prosocial Latin American. He is expert in non-profit advertising, marketing for social causes and Corporate Social Responsibility.
Åsk Dabitch, the force behind Adland. Art Director geek.
Sophie Guérinet, Event & Collection Manager at ACT Responsible.
Jean julien Guyot, Trust Manager at agency SID LEE and blogfriend for a long time at IPUB.
There is a proof that the shockvertising isn’t dead yet. This campaign of Bund, a German NGO is very hard, but direct and simple and, to my mind, efficient.
Besides, the Cannes Lions jury has been touched by this creation and has awarded it a gold lion to the press category.
Two great ideas. Two winners of the Arthur Guinness Fund Award. The Fund give up to €1 million in funding to projects that are making a positive impact on their community. It is for social entrepreneurs aged 25-35 “who have a brilliant urban regeneration idea that will make a difference to their local community.”
Above Gregory Chauvet from Glasgow Bike Shed in Scotland. He has recycled 700 bikes - and saved over 7 tonnes from going into landfill. It’s through teaching people how to mend their cycles - and from re-fitting old machines that get dropped off at his Glasgow Bike Shop that he and his team have done it.
The video below is with another winner Edwin Broni Menash from Manchester, England. He wants to combat the over-use of plastic water bottles, and the fact they get tipped into landfill by getting people to use his aluminium bottles filled with tap water. Sold in cafes in Manchester, Edwin is now bringing the project to London, starting in Tottenham. He puts 70p of all sales going to water projects in Africa and is looking to involve athletes from next year’s Olympics as well. More at Give Me Tap.
10 videos in this post selected from 116 submissions for the REC A<FAIR.
REC A<FAIR is a German short film competition about Fair Trade organized by Forum Fairer Handel. Recently they announced the winner, see below.
Not all videos which are submitted meet the high communication standards. Special skills are needed to make a good storyline and good editing is crucial. Nevertheless I’m surprised about the amount of videos submitted for this contest.
Most videos are in German but it is obvious what it is about: Fair Trade. All submissions and full credits at the contest website.
The video above is my favourite.
Title: I wear only sweat
Director: Manon Heugel
Below the contest winner:
Title: Du hast es in der Hand (You’re in control)
Director: Kai Uwe Lipphardt, Martin Murch
A guy buys a bar of chocolate in the supermarket. Just like it happens every day a thousand times.
Volkswagen organized the Fun Theory awardlast autumn in the winter of 2009/2010. The award was about to change people’s behavior for the better. But it must be change while having fun.
The winning idea of the fun theory award was submitted by Kevin Richardson, USA: the Speed Camera Lottery. Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do? This was the question Kevin’s idea answered and it was so good that Volkswagen, together with The Swedish National Society for Road Safety, actually made this innovative idea a reality in Stockholm, Sweden.
The idea here is capture on camera the people who keep to the speed limit. They would have their photos taken and registration numbers recorded and entered into a lottery. Winners would recieve cash prizes and be notified by post. Better still, the winnig pot would come from the people who were caught speeding.
See all award entries here and finalists here.
(via)
We’re proud to announce the winner of Osocio’s Campaign of 2010: Embrace Life - always wear your seatbelt. The video became an absolute hit in the Social Advertising world last year. And now it is official: we think that this is the best what was made in 2010.
The work from director Daniel Cox is part of a wider campaign from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP). But the video from the campaign was the big surprise for us. We wrote about it for the first time a year ago, in January. Now it is viewed 13,293,485 times on YouTube.
Jury member Tim Nudd:
The whole safe-driving category is full of blood and guts and scare tactics. “Embrace Life” beautifully goes in the other direction, artfully and poignantly making the point that you should wear a seatbelt because you want to live—not because you don’t want to die. It’s one of the most touching and compelling PSAs I’ve ever seen, and an overwhelming viral success. What more could you want from a social campaign?
Jury member Nedra Kline Weinreich:
The Embrace Life ad is one of my favorite examples to show when I talk about how to bring emotion into your message. Through a combination of a family scene that many can connect with, bringing in the strong underlying value of protecting and being protected by your family, with the drama heightened by the music, this ad makes me tear up every time I see it. It’s also a great example of how to use a positive message to promote traffic safety rather than the graphic blood-and-guts approach that turns many people off.
Jury member Tom Megginson:
Embrace Life had no shock, no clever reveal, and the special effects were just a slow motion camera. But by drawing the viewer into an authentic emotional connection between a man and his family, it communicated one simple message: you should wear your seatbelt because you want to live for them, and because they want you to live. I’m a father, and it literally brought tears to my eyes the first time I watched it. That doesn’t happen often.
The campaign has scooped a wide range of awards, including YouTube Ad of the Year, a Prince Michael International Road Safety Award, Gold World Medal, New York International Advertising Awards; a Bronze Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Awards; Highly Commended from the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation and the advert was also featured in the Advertising Producers Award (APA) 2010 collection.
Global support for the campaign has been high - especially through Twitter and Facebook, where one viewer was moved to create a group dedicated to getting the campaign on TV.
We did an interview last year with Neil Hopkins, the Communications Manager from SSRP. Read it here.
Osocio is proud to announce a list of twenty nominees for the Osocio’s Best Campaign of 2010 award.
Last year, we did this for the first time and it was quite interesting. In 2010 we did it a little differently.
Each month, all the Osocio bloggers voted for the Campaign of the Month. The result: 15 great campaigns shortlisted for this Campaign of the Year election (15 because in three months we had two winners).
From all second places I choose personally 5 editor picks. that makes 20 nominees in total.
Changing behaviours
“We’re in the business of changing behaviours, not winning awards.” is the statement Armando made last year. Why are we doing this award, then? Because we want to put the most creative and innovative social ads in the spotlight, so that non-profit organizations can learn and benefit from these best practices.
We don’t intend to compete with big advertising festivals. Our aim is to award grassroots initiatives and advertising campaigns that try to solve real-life problems. Let’s not forget that Osocio is the place where advertising and activism collide.
Evolution
The 20 nominees this year show us a remarkable evolution in social advertising. When I started blogging about this niche industry in 2005, most of the campaigns where print-only. The majority of the campaigns in 2010 are driven by online video. Digital and real-world interactivity, and social media, are growing fast. My prediction for 2011 is that these two will be the leading campaign instruments.
Jury
Just like last year each jury member will choose a top-10 from the nominees list and score them from 1 to 10.
All Osocio bloggers are members of the jury. And I’m proud to announce these ten external jury members:
The deadline for the jury is February 5.
The winner will be announced at February 7.
This is the Top 20 list of the best social campaigns featured on Osocio in 2010. One of these campaigns will become the Osocio’s Best Campaign of 2010 (see them after the break):
The Osocio bloggers choose the best campaign every month. At the end of the year we will have twelve great campaigns from which we will choose the Campaign of the Year. This is very nearby. Stay tuned. At the end of January we will announce the Campaign of the Year 2010.
In December we have two winners:
What’s so great about growing old?
This cheeky campaign from Y&R Peru answers the question in some funny ways.
It’s not a campaign for old people. It’s a campaign aimed at young people with visions of how they might be one day.
Attraction Le Manga
This is most striking campaign from 2010.
Japan 2014. Come into the life of Hiro, Koichi and Ren and interact with your webcam and facebook profile: Attraction.
You as viewer receive prompts to help the characters in their adventures via motion or color recognition with your webcam. All in manga style in this 10 minute adventure.
During this adventure it becomes clear that the story is about the struggle to resist the influence of friends and later on about tobacco addiction.
Women’s Voices Now is a New York based NGO founded in January 2010. The mission of WVN is to empower women and give voice to the struggle for civil, economic and political rights.
Their first project is hosting Women’s Voices from the Muslim World: A Short-Film Festival.
As they say: “A collection of voices from women of all faiths living in Muslim-majority countries and Muslim women living as minorities around the world that fills the void in information created by traditional news, media and art sources.” It is what’s being called the first-ever international showcase of short films about Islam and women.
The submission deadline closed on November 24. The competition include cash prizes of $35,000 and the opportunity to be featured in the WVN Festival in Los Angeles, March 10-12, 2011. 93 short films are in the final round containing fiction, experimental, documentary and student work. You can see them all on the WVN website.
I choose a few of my favourites for what it’s worth (as seen through the eyes of an outsider).
Above a film by Mostafa Heravi
With: Somaye Dehban; Music: Wim Mertens
I’m a proud. We had a little influence on the success of the Embrace Life campaign from Sussex Safer Roads Partnership (SSRP). It was meant as a local campaign, in the beginning it wasn’t even published on YouTube. Together with Adfreak and Work That Matters we ask SSRP to publish it on world’s most popular video platform.
The video which is part of a wider campaign won many prices. Now it is nominated for I Love Ads, the YouTube Ad of the Year award.
28 videos are nominated, all published between 1 January 2009 and 31 August 2010.
Is the award an objective reflection what is made by the ad industry? No it isn’t. Most of the videos are feel good stories, none of them are explicite. And all nominated videos come from two continents.
I voted for Embrace Life because of my special connection with the campaign. Another three videos from the Osocio niche are nominated. See them after the break.
The winning video gets a YouTube homepage ‘made over’ which is worth 11 million views.
In the DRC, sexual violence is a community-wide problem. Rape, in the DRC has been used as a weapon of war and sadly continues to increase even after. According to the peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground, it is estimated that there are over 400,000 surviving rape victims living…
In the movie Hot Tub Time Machine, John Cusack goes “back to the future” and discovers that his friend Lou has become incredibly wealthy due to a little search-engine-that-could that he aptly named “Lougle.” It’s a fun example of how an individual’s name can become a familiar household term…
Search through Osocio selected websites about social advertising, marketing, fundraising, ngo's and other on topic resources.
News aggregated from our favourite blogs
About Osocio
Osocio is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. It’s the place where marketing and activism collide. Formerly known as the Houtlust Blog, Osocio is the central online hub for advertisers, ad agencies, grassroots, activists, social entrepreneurs, and good Samaritans from around the globe.
Osocio e-mail newsletter: highlighting the best social campaigns at Osocio, social advertising related news and field news from around the world.
You can now subscribe by entering your e-mail address here.
What a year for social causes and the communications behind them. A year that no-one could have predicted. A year when change was driven more from the grassroots than by experts at nonprofits. And yet, where communications platforms and ideas still had a vital role to play.
Read more |
Post comment (0)
We’re proud to announce the winner of 
