Seen and noted

BEST TV
Winner: Worldwide Developer's Conference. Watchable, silly, informed by a sense of itself. Hangs together. Aware. Free of the selfishness, pomp, and tone deafness that drowns most of the rest in this category. I like the dude they casted. And his plant. I want them both to be okay.

Runner up: Volvo XC60. The only other one in this category I might have watched to the end without the artificiality of (agreeing to) this assignment. The heaps of craft thrown at it make a difference.
This is one of two ads (among six) in this category to feature couples of mixed ethnicity. I would love an article that documents these decisions; what/went goes into them? Who decided - Director? Client? Agency? - and what guided the choice? What might have begun as individuals within an industry insisting on a more diverse world starts to smell like a pro forma industry trend - garlic, a cross, and holy water to preempt unsavoury accusations.

Are we manifesting diversity here, or merely protecting ourselves? What do we really care about? Beyond casting what are we doing?

I'd like to believe we mean it. I'd like to believe we can engender diversity, and I hope we're endeavouring to do so sincerely, thoroughly: staffing to reflect or to over-index against our at-large populations, supporting refugees and the disadvantaged, engaging the public in a rich diversity of thought—The Things.

Discuss.

BEST PRINT
Winner: Do I have to pick a winner?
Runner up: Do I have to pick a runner up?

None of this print demands to be taken seriously. Not as a public-facing communications. It feels like student work created for the consideration of advertising people only.

BEST OUTDOOR
Winner: Comedian's Worst Nightmare. Strikes me as one very creative answer to giving a rare affliction its due visibility. I hope the stunt got press, I hope the story made the rounds, and I hope crowbars pried open wallets for the cause. Nederlandse collega's: wat zeg je?

Runner up: Evidence Car. I hope the case study film doesn't over egg the press worthiness of the venture. I'd be pleased if I had done it. Not a perfect execution, no, but perfect is a fool's errand. Progress, not perfection, is the motto.

BEST INTERACTIVE
Winner: Colgate-Palmolive Pocket Dentist. Smart. Efficient. It's not hard to imagine a gigantic impact relative to the simplicity of its moves. Helps the client, helps the population - a virtuous symbiosis. Thumbs up emojis in a variety of skin tones.

Runner up: Sao Paulo's Public Prosecutor Office: Terms & Conditions. The idea that rape is cool if women dress how they want...wouldn't it be easier to force women to wear something like, oh, I don't know...ground-length opaque plastic garbage bags with eye slits? Alternatively we could teach two codes of law: one for men, who are free, one for women, who are free with an asterisk. And then we can follow that asterisk down to the bottom of our Laws page where we clarify: *Just kidding. Women are not free.
The Terms & Conditions idea does wonderful things to dismantle outmoded ideas.




This week's guest judge is Jeff Kling, chief creative officer, Fallon, New York.

His plans to rebuild the Death Star on temporary hold, this chief creative officer of Fallon Worldwide hopes: 1. his ambient dislike of advertising has bettered his own work; and 2. that no one will mind him not having fulfilled his imagined potential as a world-champion surfer.

Jeff created Dos Equis's "The Most Interesting Man in the World," rubber-stamped Nike's "Write the Future" campaign and authored the Miller High Life manifesto and campaign that still forms the playbook for many strategists, agencies, and brands. Recently he gave Arby's The Meats, bade fond farewell to Arby's nemesis Jon Stewart, helped America get its billions back, and helped Loctite win advertising's 2014 Super Bowl.

In his fourteen-hundred thirty-seven-thousand years in the business, Kling has quarterbacked national and global work for Heineken, Coca-Cola, Jaguar, EA, Nokia, Volvo, Honda, The Eye Film Institute Netherlands, Miller Genuine Draft, ESPN, Clearasil, Gore-Tex and many, many more-and for a host of dead dot-coms, for whose busted first-wave bubble he is personally responsible.

Father to two semi-Austrian daughters who karate-kick the bejeezus out of every day and tell him no in three languages, he is possibly the luckiest bastard alive.