Selected Winning Work from The Denver 50 Show 2009

By The Denver Egotist / December 11, 2009 /

If you were there last night, you already know. If you weren’t, you’re about to.

Instead of standing on the ad stage for its annual award show like an awkward, pimply-faced teen stumbling through a rendition of the Jonas Brothers’ ‘Lovebug,’ Denver was Ozzy in his Black Sabbath heyday biting off the head of a rabies-ridden bat last night. That was dramatic. The winning work made us feel pretty damn stoked to be part of what’s going on in the ad industry in this city right now.

Among the many “I-wish-I-did-that” looks on attendee’s faces, it was great to see some agencies that haven’t been represented in the past. Similar to Sukle dominating the show with its work for Denver Water last year, Boulder’s TDA had a huge number of well-deserved pieces selected from their FirstBank campaign this year. We were also happy to see Crispin’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign for Burger King posted among the 50 winning ideas. The Boulder juggernaut could certainly have overtaken the entire show if desired, but we’re excited (and hopeful for the future) that they’re showing support for the local scene by at least firing off a handful of entries. A few new players also grabbed up some brass, including Futuristic Films, OBrien Advertising and Sterling-Rice Group.

The only low point of the evening was when they ran out of mini-beef wellingtons. And the bar ran out of limes. Or rather, the bar never stocked limes. Two things we’ll easily look past because the work was so tasty.

The ad club was kind enough to let us post a pdf of the entire book (40 MB pdf) for your downloading pleasure if you didn’t get a hard copy at the show (be sure to look at the sponsors page to see who helped fund the fun). You can grab that here. And if you want a hard copy of your own, order one for $15 here.

Here’s a selection of our favorite work from The Denver 50 2009. Nice showing, Denver. And nice work, ad club. The club has definitely righted itself after last year’s snore fest and the future is looking bright(er). Let’s keep going.

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Pizza Inn TV; TDA Advertising & Design
Families find some ridiculous reasons to argue, but Pizza Inn provides one thing they can always agree on. That was the simple idea behind this TV and radio campaign meant to make people laugh and get them talking about Pizza Inn again.

Jimmy John’s Studio Micro Site; Xylem Digital
Jimmy John’s is a sub shop that happens to make a killer sandwich – but one thing that separates it from competitors is their speed. They make a sandwich so fast, it’s Freaky! Using viral and community marketing, which as we all know can also be Freaky Fast, Xylem used the theme to develop and design the yearlong Jimmy John’s Freaky Fast campaign.

The campaign began with the Freaky Fast Garage micro site, using NASCAR to emphasize sandwich delivery that’s “So Fast You’ll Freak.” The Sizzle site promoted making it fast and fun and the Jimmy John’s Studio micro site enabled fans to record their own karaoke, singing along with the “So Fast You’ll Freak” theme song. Xylem gave fans the opportunity to create custom vocals set to 5 music genres, record the audio mix and send it to friends or to a mobile device as a ring-tone.

FirstBank Airport Mobile Alerts; TDA Advertising & Design
Denver International Airport is one of the biggest and busiest airports in the country; over 50 million passengers fly in and out. FirstBank wanted to make their presence known, by practically owning the advertising within the facility. They set out to tie-in airport-related ideas with the fact that their Mobile Banking and Mobile Alerts features can work anywhere. Now, everywhere you go is a branch of FirstBank. You can see if your check deposited while waiting at baggage claim, or check your balance while sitting at your gate. A great feature with an appropriate tie-in.

Mountain Dew DEWmocracy; Motive
Mountain Dew reintroduced its user-generated soda program, DEWmocracy, with a twist—this year, every component and decision about the program would be user-driven. Flavor; name; packaging; advertising. In 2010, the new DEW would be truly “by the people.”

For its launch, Motive created DEW Labs, a crowd-sourcing think-thank providing a transparent platform for consumer involvement. Web-centric celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Shira Lazar helped kick things off with a promotional challenge encouraging consumers to “show their DEWness” via video or email. The top ‘DEWmeisters’ landed roles in DEW Labs’ first phase: choosing the flavor. Winners received seven never-before-tasted DEW flavors, DEW-inspired art, FlipVideo Camcorders, and one objective: taste, debate, and ultimately decide your favorite flavor, capturing the process on video.

Hundreds of video submissions, 50 tasting videos and millions of social media impressions made DEWmocracy’s launch a viral sensation. DEW Labs is now evolving into a permanent platform for consumer engagement.

Denver Water Grass Is Dumb; Sukle Advertising & Design
After months of intensive account planning and in-depth research we uncovered THE key insight; grass is ignorant. It didn’t know the square root of 9,879,879,212,340. It didn’t know the 17th President of the United States. It didn’t even know basic geography. And it certainly wouldn’t notice a little less water. A reduction of just 2 minutes of watering would save the city nearly 1 million gallons of water each summer. An out-of-home, TV and guerilla campaign drove the message home and helped to reduce water consumption to new levels.

Wyoming Department of Health Let it Out Campaign; Barnhart
Wyoming is a beautiful, sparsely populated state. But sadly it has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country. So when the Wyoming Department of Health came to us for help, we asked ourselves “How do you tell someone not to commit suicide?” We concluded that you don’t. Wyoming needed a cultural shift to get teens and young adults to open up. We developed a campaign aimed at promoting a website for them to talk openly and honestly about everything: a place to vent. We set up statewide rage events that included car smashes, guitar hero competitions, live bands and even a bucking rooster, all with the theme Let it Out. Add in a video contest and give away posters and t-shirts, stickers and custom skateboards, and we found that we weren’t only getting our message out there, but we’d started a bit of a movement. What started as a website with blog postings and multimedia content, has become an online community where kids have opened up much faster than we ever thought possible. Engagement and time on the site has surpassed everyone’s expectations. Here’s to letting it out in Wyoming.

Department of Public Health and Environment The Cigarette is Dead; Cactus
The brief was to motivate young adults to quit smoking. Today, smoking has become passé due to the wide-spread knowledge of its unhealthy effects; but, we needed to bury the impulse to light-up completely.

The Cigarette is Dead hit the urban landscape with chalk stencils, banners, large-form posters and building projections, murals and structural drapes. It created an underground sensation and ignited chatter for the movement. We extended the movement by documenting the guerilla components in print and TV ads. Guerilla and mass media pushed to the Web site; the site presented the grim facts, invited visitors to share their experiences, and linked them to resources to kill their addiction.

From sidewalks to skyscrapers, 75,000 off-line executions were posted, projected, glued, draped and dropped in the first three months alone. We conducted events on 17 campuses and in 28 communities in 73 days.

The Cigarette Is Dead from FL2 Interactive on Vimeo.

Keystone Light Keystolog; The Integer Group
Campers and hunters have two things in common. They love the great outdoors, and swapping stories around the campfire. The last thing these guys want to do is waste time scouting for soggy twigs to get the fire going.

Keystone Light comes to the rescue with the Keystolog: kindling these guys could download and print from a special microsite, cut and fold into logs, and bingo—the fire’s going in no time.

Colorado Lottery “Bomb Squad” TV Spot; Cactus
The Brief: Drive sales of Colorado Lottery Scratch tickets. Remind viewers that luck happens everyday.

The Execution: The Luck Happens TV campaign tells the story of everyday characters who are hit by the stroke of luck. The quirky spots feature unexpected, over-the-top story lines that are rooted in reality—they resonate with the dream of winning inside each of us. For the first time in the Lottery’s history, the Lottery has received consumer emails asking why “Bomb Squad” was taken off the air and asking for it to run again.

Chez Cheese Gourmet Market Posters/Nontraditional; OBrien Advertising
Research showed that many people were too intimidated to enter a fine cheese store due to their lack of “cheese knowledge.” So we decided to position Chez Cheese as the cheese experts who can put people at ease and educate them on all the different types of cheese in the world.

The posters were placed in high pedestrian areas around the cheese store and the mouse trap with the sign “Capture some cheese knowledge” was placed in the same vicinity with an arrow pointing toward the store.