To mark the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Marketing is looking to name the best Canadian advertising of the last 10 years. Up for the award are the Best of Show winners from the last 10 Marketing Awards shows. We’re profiling the nominees in Marketing Daily, with the winner announced at the 2010 Marketing Awards, June 9. Be sure to cast your vote by visiting CampaignOfTheDecade.ca.
Thanks to a “great creative brief,” Zig‘s Toronto office made a housekeeping jail-break to clench Best of Show at the 2005 Marketing Awards for its work on Unilever‘s Vim cleaning brand.
“The client agreed to actually do something different in the category, before we even started thinking of spots,” said Aaron Starkman, the agency’s chief creative officer and partner today, though still a writer then.
The 30-second commercial showed a pale female “inmate” placing her hand on the glass in front of her in an attempt to connect with her daughter who is on the other side.
“When are you gonna get out of here?” asks the little girl.
“In a while,” responds the mother who turns out to be cleaning, and returns to the task of tirelessly scrubbing the bathtub.
The agency developed a series of ads, all of which were based on the insight that cleaning can be a brutal chore.
Going into round two of testing, “Prison Visitor” was the second choice for Starkman and his then-partner Stephen Leps (who recently left the agency). Good thing they went into testing.
The win was particularly rewarding because of the “amazing work done in Canada that year.” The spot also won a Gold Film Lion at Cannes in 2004. “There were three Gold Lions in film from Canada, and that matched the total number of lions won by the United States,” said Starkman.
With the Marketing Awards only days away, the Mentos “Make Art Pop” campaign from Cossette Montreal is leading the charge for the Campaign of the Decade title. In second place is Molson Canadian’s “The Rant” from Bensimon-Byrne D’Arcy, followed by Taxi‘s “Elevator/Office/Golf” campaign for Viagra, and then Dove’s “Evolution.”
For tickets and information about the Marketing Awards click here.
