Agency Spy

WPP’s JWT and Ogilvy & Mather and Omnicom Group’s BBDO are the biggest winners at the upcoming 40th annual Effie Awards that honor effective advertising, the Effies organization said today.

JWT and Ogilvy will each receive seven Effies and BBDO will get six at the ceremony which is to be held June 4 at  in New York. Omnicom’s DDB and WPP’s Grey and Leo Burnett will each take home five trophies.

There are more intimate details of who won & for what here (courtesy of our friends at Adweek) — that being said, do the Effies matter anymore?  (I guess you can get the cliffhanger aspect by waiting to see who wins the “Grand Effie” — the word “effie” makes me think of a Beavis & Butthead chuckle though.)

If so, why is it the usual holding company suspects getting all the awards (that being said, I’m more than ignorant about how the Effies are awarded and whatever process they use to determine the winners — so feel free to educate me and/or rip me a new asshole in the comments.  More about the “process” here though)

Here is what their own website says about the awards:

“Effie awards Ideas that Work – the great ideas that achieve real results and the strategy that goes into creating them.

Effie winners represent client and agency teams who tackled a marketplace challenge with a big idea and knew exactly how to communicate their message to their customer.

Since 1968, winning an Effie has become a global symbol of achievement. Today, Effie celebrates effectiveness worldwide with the Global Effie, the Euro Effie and more than 30 national Effie programs.”

Does that sound like the usual bullshit?  Do we (the royal “We” strikes again) care about the Effies at all anymore (if ever that is — outside the fact that it probably boosts the price tag of the winner’s salary when they bail out to a new gig at a different agency.)

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Jason Oke, who has been the blogger of note over at the Leo Burnett blog, The Fruits Of The Imagination, is leaving his post at the agency as a VP of Strategic Planning. We’ve enjoyed his posting on the blog and we’re happy to see that Oke is now the Director of Strategic Planning at a new agency called Juniper Park. No details on the agency yet, but a hearty congrats to a fin, fine blogger.

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