What do you get when you put 1,000 creative and media people together for a weeklong celebration of the best in the business?
If those clichés about the advertising industry hold any water, one can expect to see slapstick antics, tears, drama, a dose of glamour, elaborate heists and, possibly, the occasional extraterrestrial lurking in the shadows.
And that was what you would have missed out on if you weren’t present at the Gong Show and Singapore Media Awards, which were held at Shangri-La Hotel on 2 and 3 September respectively.
The first night saw four lanky aliens trawling the stage as the Gong Show kickstarted after a year-long hiatus to award the best work in Singapore’s creative scene. While the aliens claimed they meant no harm, they were in fact close to abducting the ethereal Valerie Cheng, Executive Director of Publicis Modem, also the Gong Show’s first female chairperson. Thankfully, the four alpha male jury heads were present to shield her from harm.
One of the jury heads, Pann Lim, Creative Director at Kinetic Singapore, rushed over to Shangri-La Hotel after a grueling plane ride. He was in time to see Kinetic sweep several major awards at the Gong Show, including a New Art Director win for Kinetic’s Jonathan Gian and the coveted Gong for Design, which was also the only Gong given out that night.
Kinetic was not the only big winner that night. DDB Singapore hauled several awards for their Bose and Penguin Books campaigns to win Agency of the Year, whilst Y&R Singapore won golds for their Mint Museum campaign. Leo Burnett’s tearjerker Funeral also swept golds for advertising and TVC craft.
The copious amounts of beer and wine presented several chances for merrymaking, with one notable example being Angus Fraser, Managing Director of JWT Singapore, who gamely brought the celebrations over to the following night at the Singapore Media Awards with dance moves that could make a gymnast blush. Then together with the team from Mindshare Singapore, Angus heated up the stage again with a victory dance as they celebrated major wins for their client Pizza Hut. Angus’ moves were far from bovine. So was the startling revelation from Moove Media CEO.
Jayne Kwek that same night, who revealed to the emcee that close to half of the Moove Media cows have been stolen since the inception of their outdoor advertising campaigns. The audience literally gasped in a “Wah Cow!”* moment.
Just like any good soap opera, the real tearjerkers were reserved towards the end of the SMA night, as Vikram Bansal, Managing Director of ZenithOptimedia took to the stage to be awarded the coveted Media Person of the Year title.
In a twist worthy of Korean dramas, the audience found out that Vikram’s nominator turned out to be a competitor in the industry – Pat Lim, Managing Director of Briq Communications. The two shared a congratulatory embrace on stage and Vikram was visibly moved to tears. It was a far cry from the goofy grin in the photo flashed on screen, where he stood alongside celebrity sexpot Fiona Xie.
These were snapshots of the Awards Week that would have been strong contenders for Best of Show, if there were categories for drama and debauchery. But for the actual results, you may refer here for the Gong Show, andhere for Singapore Media Awards.
*pun on a Mandarin dialect, which doubles up as a crude exclamation.
