Best Nation / Place Branding Campaign, which reflects the increasing importance of international advertising campaigns created by national governments and city authorities to drive tourism, inward investment and international commerce or to promote a nation or place brand around cultural or sporting events.

Best International Communications Strategy, which celebrates the big idea that has enabled a brand to achieve success across international markets – our judges will be looking for campaigns that demonstrate clear consumer insight, a brilliant strategy and a precisely managed execution to engage the target audience.

The deadline for submitting all entries is 16 June and the winners will be celebrated at a Gala Awards Dinner held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London on 9 September,

FOR THE FULL LIST OF CATEGORIES, CLICK HERE

FOR FULL DETAILS ON HOW TO ENTER, CLICK HERE

Along the way the team encountered tunnels, wine-less service stations, witches, insomnia, snoring and a human watermelon.

Needless to say, the journey was a memorable one and the Festival, for those who made it to Spain, was regarded as highly valuable, with great speakers and intimate networking.

C Squared would like to say a big thank you to everyone – speakers, sponsors and delegates - who made the extra effort to attend what was a truly memorable Festival of Media.

To follow the ‘love bus’ journey CLICK HERE

C Squared is amongst good company in being shortlisted, with entrepreneurial brands LOVEFilm, Feel Good Drinks, Multimap and Lucky Voice having been finalists in previous years.

The winner will be revealed on Wednesday 14th April at an Awards ceremony held at the London Marriott, Grosvenor Square.

For individual users around the world, Cream will act as a window on the world of marketing innovation and for many global businesses, Cream’s architecture can be appropriated and tailored in order to create bespoke knowledge sharing systems, pre-loaded with Cream information. This facility is designed to help global brands share and re-apply innovation and best practice across their local teams. Cream has already begun working with one of the world’s largest brewers, SABMiller on driving their innovation, internal communications and training.

Sunita Anderson, Group Marketing Knowledge Manager from SABMiller, said: “We have only been subscribing to Cream for a few months and already it has become quite the global phenomenon. Intended as stimulating brain food for our marketing community - particularly at key times in our brand planning cycle - we took the initiative to also share this resource with the full business: cross-functions, across levels and throughout our regions”.

Cream is the product of more than 12 months of research and IT development and is being headed by David Morgan, the former Global Chief Client Officer of Universal McCann and previously the CEO of WPP’s MEC Asia.

Said Morgan: “According to a recent Accenture survey, 89% of US and UK executives agree that innovation is as important, if not more important than cost reduction to their companies’ ability to achieve future growth. Added to this is the fact that C Squared has been hearing for many years the challenges that brands face in trying to share and re-apply the best thinking globally. Cream has been designed to address these two areas. But we also aim to save our clients money – by saving many of them the costs of building and maintaining costly intranets and, for the bulk of our users, the time involved in finding creative insights for pitches and RFPs and in establishing benchmarks of performance”.

For more information, please contact:

David Morgan, Business Development Director
+44 (0)207 367 6979
david@csquared.cc

Olivia Solon, Editor - Cream
+44 (0)207 367 6992
olivia@csquared.cc

“The answers to all your communication problems don’t sit in a copywriting department,” he said. “Sure, some might, but think broader because your problems are broader now.”

Crowe said the best media executions are brave, helpful and engaging.

To demonstrate bravery, for example, Crowe pointed to India where Gillette’s Mach 3 razor was 10 times the price of popular straight razors. Gillete initiated an AC Nielsen study to determine whether the country preferred its men stubbly or clean-shaven.

“It’s brave because they didn’t know what the outcome of that study would be… and they invested the marketing capital in that research.”

The study, which led to a national media-supported, events-driven PR campaign, saw trial of the product increase 400%.

Crowe also hailed Unilever Canada’s Body & Soul play for Dove soap as a brave venture for taking a marketing initiative into the theatre world. Despite the risk, it saw large-scale brand and awareness metric increases.

“You can scale that so many ways,” he said. “That could be a big international campaign. We see so many great ideas from local markets, but so many advertisers haven’t figured out how to share and reapply that creativity in different markets.”

Crowe ended his presentation with the idea that there are many media opportunities in countries with gaps in public service spending. Crowe acknowledged, for example, The Clorox Company for distributing Glad garbage bags during Toronto’s garbage strike this past summer.

By Jeromy Lloyd  

“Next year we predict a little stability in global advertising, or growth of about 1 per cent, at the same time that most major economies are drawing down major deficits,” said Mr Crowe, whose London-based company is behind Media and Marketing magazine and the Festival of Media advertising awards.

“This means huge pressure on public expenditures … so there’s an opportunity for advertisers and their projects to fill the gap.”

Some have begun to already. In July, Clorox recognised a strike by rubbish collectors in Toronto as an ideal chance to market their Glad brand rubbish bags. The company donated 25,000 bags to the city, bussed in volunteers to help with the pickup and passed out materials on how residents could manage their trash during the strike.
“Their ‘Glad To The Rescue’ campaign seized an opportunity to create an enormous amount of goodwill for their brand,” Mr Crowe said.

The winner of this year’s Festival of Media awards in Valencia for the service category was Philips in China, which tried to tackle the problem of long queues at Chinese hospitals by creating a branded text messaging system to tell patients when they were near the front of the line.

The electronics maker based in the Netherlands also ran public service announcements encouraging people to use their local clinics rather than the larger, crowded hospitals.

Although Philips’s “sense and simplicity” campaign was essentially a business-to-business message, it was able to build its brand by filling in where public services fell short, Mr Crowe said.

“What was particularly pertinent about that was the 65 per cent reduction in airtime costs because the TVC [TV commercial] was classified as a public service announcement,” he said.

Even before the recession, countries such as the US and Japan, which spent less on public services as a percentage of GDP compared with their European peers, were seeing increases in advertising that attempted to fill a public role.

Between 2006 and 2008, Japan and the US taken together saw the service category of advertising jump from 5 to 16 per cent of total ad spending, according to Cream magazine’s Innovation Exchange study.

Last month, a US survey by Noral Group International, a public service ad firm, found that one in four television media directors expected the amount of airtime dedicated to public service announcements to increase, while eight out of 10 expected it to either increase or stay the same.

Public service announcement “airtime availability is the one thing in this recession that is not going down”, Eva Kasten, the president of Noral, said in announcing the results.
“There isn’t very much good news in a recession, but this is the exception.”
@Body-NoIndent:
khagey@thenational.ae

Lord Bell will provide the introduction to a day that will be led by Simon Anholt, the leading authority on place branding and competitive identity, who will be revealing the latest findings from the Anholt Nation Brands Index, which ranks the nations of the world in terms of global public opinion. 

The Nation Branding Global Masterclass is already attracting a global audience, with a delegate list that includes representatives from the Israeli Government, Flanders Government, VisitBritain, Slovak Republic, City of Cologne, Canadian Tourism Commission, Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade for Luxembourg, the UNWTO and the Ukrainian Government.  Also participating will be Danny Lopez, Managing Director of the Marketing Group of UKTI and Tim Hill, the Marketing Director of consultancy FutureBrand, who is working with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games on the marketing of “Brand London” around the 2012 Olympics.

A limited number of places are still available at this event.  For more information, visit www.nationbrandingevents.com or call +44 (0) 207 367 6983.

Launched in 1994, MTN Group has its core operations in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East and reaches more than 90 million subscribers.

The Africa Nation Branding Masterclass held in Accra, Ghana on 28 September 2009 will have a welcome address from the Vice-President of Ghana, John Mahama and also feature Professor Arthur Mutambara, Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe and Itumeleng Dlamini, the international relations manager for 2010 FIFA World Cup Organising Committee.

For more information on the Nation Branding Masterclasses and to book a place, click here.

The Awards themselves were warmly received by the audience, with MediaCom becoming a first time winner of the Media Agency of the Year award and Boon Lai, Philips International head of brand strategy and marcom and Simon Clift, Unilever’s global chief marketing officer, were jointly awarded the accolade of International Marketer of the Year.

C Squared would like to congratulate all the winners of the awards and all those shortlisted. C Squared would also like to thank all the sponsors of the awards for their support.

Further information on the awards and all the winners can be found here.

The Masterclass, led by Simon Anholt, will examine topics including: Africa’s branding challenges, Nation Branding techniques and how the World Cup in South Africa will contribute to the development of Africa’s brand.

For more information on the Nation Branding Masterclasses and to book a place, click here.

Those competing for the Media Excellence Award, which this year pays tribute to the client companies that have best supported international media over the last 20 years, are: Accenture, Adidas, Allianz, Canon, Credit Suisse, Ford, HP, HSBC, Mandarin Oriental, Nokia, Patek Philippe, Philips, Rolex, Shell and Singapore Airlines.

“It’s fantastic to see the huge number of advertisers, media owners and agency personnel that have engaged in the Awards voting,” said Pip Brooking, editor, M&M. “It shows that people really care about the outcome of these Awards.” 

The winners of both polls will be unveiled at the M&M Awards Gala Dinner on 10 September in London.

The 56 entries, selected as the cream of the crop, were drawn from the highest number of entries that the Awards had received in the last three years. The standard in many categories was very high, especially in the Best Use of Content, The International Integration Award and Best Contribution to an International Campaign by a Media Owner awards.

The shortlisted campaigns represent the best international advertising covering over 30 countries, including Latin America, US, Australasia, the Middle East, Nordics, as well as both Eastern and Western Europe.

Other Masterclass events will take place in Delhi, Singapore, Dubai and London.  Professor Mutambara will speak about the plans of the coalition government in Zimbabwe to rebuild the nation and restore its economic competitiveness.

For more information about Nation Branding, please visit our website www.nationbrandingevents.com

The session highlighted key issues ranging from measurement to creativity, but the consensus was that advertisers’ approach to digital was not yet robust enough to see it gain as much as it should in the current economic climate.

For full coverage, see the July/August issue of M&M.

Pip Brooking continues as editor of M&M, reporting into Greg Brooks, C Squared’s head of content strategy.

Charlie Crowe, chief executive of C Squared, said: “I am delighted to have concluded this transaction. M&M’s greatest asset is the loyalty of its readers and advertisers. Where other media business titles have tried and failed to cover the ‘international’ market, M&M has stuck at it for 20 years.”

“During these current hard times we will continue to serve our industry. Going forward, M&M has huge potential: M&M needs to serve the increasing number of regional advertising decision-makers in emerging markets and we also have a number of exciting plans to address the specific needs of buyers and sellers within the international advertising community in new and innovative ways.”