On pigs' back

A TELEVISION commercial for the Guardian and a campaign for luxury goods company Montblanc were the big winners at the Kinsale Sharks advertising festival this weekend as creatives and executives from the Irish and international industry flocked to a marquee to celebrate the best of the year’s work.

London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty won the jury’s Grand Prix for Three Little Pigs, a commercial that showcased Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s “open news” concept of journalism by imagining how the media group might cover the fairytale of The Three Little Pigs as a modern news story.

Trevor Beattie, who headed the judging panel, awarded the chairman’s prize to Leo Burnett Milan for The Beauty of a Second, a campaign for Montblanc that invited filmmakers to send one-second videos, the best of which were artfully strung together in an ad for Montblanc’s watch range. “This was the most outstanding piece of work this year,” Mr Beattie said.

Among the gold Shark awards won by agency of the year AMV BBDO was for best use of social media in a campaign for Masterfoods’s Snickers called You’re Not You When You’re Hungry, in which various celebrities were paid to tweet about unexpected subjects. The campaign hit the headlines when glamour model Katie Price chimed with the popular mood by tweeting: “OMG!! Eurozone debt problems can only be properly solved by true fiscal union!!! #comeonguys”. Publicis Dublin was the biggest Irish winner, with its hits including golds for Done Deal (the Husband for Sale campaign), Meteor’s Your Social Forecast (a TV3 weather sting) and the Cadbury Olympic Idents used for its RTÉ Sport sponsorship.

A hard-hitting television campaign for the ISPCC in which a girl is seen to have absorbed the abusive remarks she received, culminating in the message “children believe what they’re told”, won golds for the agency Ogilvy Mather and directors Blinder Ltd.

McCann Erickson also won gold for Minnerdles, a radio ad about the benefits of radio advertising.