A creative team from BBDO’s Toronto office has won the Microsoft Advertising Challenge at the annual Dx3 Conference.
The team of art directors Spencer Dingle and Derek Blais and copywriter Jordan Hamer won the competition with a marketing solution for the annual Movember fundraising event.
Five agencies participated in the competition, which gave creative teams 27 hours to come up with a marketing solution using the various Microsoft Advertising platforms. The brief was to create a concept that would reach the many men who grow a moustache for Movember but fail to register with the charity’s website, preventing the event from reaching them with messaging about men’s health or fundraising suggestions.
“We talked to a lot of people in the office and some of our friends who have participated in Movember, and a lot of them didn’t even know there was a Movember.com,” said Dingle. “This is a big problem we’re trying to solve for them.”
The winning creative idea, which uses the concept of the “Moustache Police,” was built primarily around Skype, Xbox Live and Windows 8. The creative solution (which is still being developed) is designed to make it easier for people to solicit donations and increase the event’s fun factor, said Dingle.
Dingle and Hamer first partnered as students at George Brown College and have been partners at BBDO for 10 months, working on business including Mercedes Smart, Heineken and Harveys. The pair has previously won a pair of silver ADCC awards and has been featured in Applied Arts.
“It’s a great outcome,” said BBDO’s executive creative director Peter Ignazi, who receives a trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as a result of the BBDO win. The winning team receives an Xbox Kinect prize pack.
“I think they really nailed it, and I like the fact they took a different approach from a media standpoint and came up with an idea that still works,” said Ignazi. “[Microsoft] is primarily where it’s going to live, but the basis of the idea can work in any medium.”
