McConnells campaign for magazine takes top prize

A television campaign devised by McConnells Advertising for the launch of The Irish Times Magazine won the top prize in its category at this year's International Advertising Festival of Ireland in Kinsale.

There are three advertisements in the campaign and the winning one, called "Lunchbox", featured a young mother who is so absorbed reading the magazine that she mistakenly puts a sponge in her son's lunchbox while she wipes down the kitchen sink with a ham sandwich. The same campaign picked up two further awards at the festival.

The creative approach adopted by McConnells was different from a typical newspaper campaign in that it did not concentrate on the newspaper content, but instead used understated humour in the ads - which are virtually silent. Commenting on the approach, Mr Gerry Kennedy, creative director at McConnells, said: "All the ads are based around a very simple idea. The comedy is understated and the execution of the campaign, the direction and production, was excellent, and we felt that the magazine content would speak for itself in time."

The campaign has already picked up the top award at the advertising industry's other major competition, the ICADs, awarded by the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design in June.

"Kinsale is a particularly prestigious award because the festival is truly international and also because of the calibre of judges that it attracts," said Mr Kennedy. This year, which was the festival's 39th, the judges included Mr Bob Scarpelli, DDB's US chief creative director, whose agency devised the Whassup! campaign for Budweiser, as well as Mr John Hunt of Hunt Lascaris, Johannesburg and Mr Eoghan Nolan of Think and Son - a Dublin creative shop.

Delegates attending the weekend awards festival were down by nearly one-third on last year to fewer than 300 people. Entries, however, were up, which bodes well for the future success of the festival. Irish agencies, which were represented for the most part, sent fewer delegates this year than last, a sure sign of belt-tightening.

Other Irish winners included Owens DDB, The Helme Partnership and Web Factory.

The Festival Grand Prix was won by Mother Ltd's QTV campaign, and DDB Chicago won the Radio Grand Prix and several other awards for its latest Budweiser material. UK agencies Leo Burnetts, J. Walter Thompson and Saatchi & Saatchi, along with Headquarters New York, were also Gold winners.

bharrison@irish-times.ie