Grey Africa wins at the 2020 Loeries Awards
Grey Africa has announced that its work was recognised with 24 finalists across eight different categories, three statues and a Craft certificate at the 2020 Loeries Creative Awards. The agency says that this demonstrates its signature creativity and its proficiency across multiple channels.
In the PR and Media Communication category, Grey Africa was awarded a Bronze Loerie for the ‘Nozizwe’ campaign, developed for long-time client Gillette. In the Radio and Audio category, it was awarded another Bronze for the ‘#DecoloniseAutocorrect’ campaign for premium cider brand Savanna.
Additionally for Savanna, Grey received a Bronze in the Film category for its online film Savanna Jean Survivor. Also, for Consol Glass, a Film Craft Certificate was awarded for the Made for Each Other film.
“It’s obviously been an unexpected and demanding year for both the agency and its clients,” said CCO Fran Luckin. “Especially within that context, we’re honoured to have been recognised for these four innovative campaigns, all of which tackled unique marketing challenges in a heartfelt and sometimes humorous way.”
The Gillette campaign featured a short film that tells the story of the late Gogo Nozizwe, who raised her grandson Akhona on her own. It begins with the sobering fact that, in South Africa, two out of three children are raised without their fathers and points out that not all boys can turn to their fathers for advice as they reach maturity.
Gogo was there for Akhona through all of the big milestones in his life and the film, especially activated for Women’s Month, honours her and all of the other women who are grooming the male children in their care for adulthood. It was also a call to action, inviting South Africans to join Gillette in helping to shape boys into men.
“The campaign took a different approach to marketing the client’s brand,” says Luckin, “focusing on a real life situation and locating the product within that. It broke ground by telling a human story rather than just a product story and was exceptionally well received, receiving 96% positive sentiment from consumers.”
In a similar vein, the Savanna ‘#DecoloniseAutocorrect’ campaign presented the first-ever solution to the problem of mobile users not being able to type in their home language, due to the autocorrect function operating in English only.
Appropriately sound-dense for the radio medium, the headline ad starts with a tongue-in-cheek look at how autocorrect mangles languages other than English, presenting what the function does to the well-loved song, Shosholoza. The mangled version sang, “Shoulder odour, shoulder odour, Kung Fu zen loner, simulate quicksand, South Africa”.
Apart from being attention-grabbing, the ad also featured an immediate call to action for mobile users frustrated by the vagaries of autocorrect. They were invited to visit the Savanna web site and to set their phones free by downloading a free text file to be saved as a contact in their phones.
This would ‘teach’ their mobiles to recognise their preferred language, enabling them to text in that language without their messages being distorted beyond recognition.
“The ‘#DecoloniseAutocorrect’ campaign gave people who prefer to text in languages other than English a real benefit from their favourite cider, which is as unapologetic about what it is as they are,” says Luckin. “Again, it was about making the product relevant in everyday life, taking it beyond traditional features and benefits.”
The Savanna Jean campaign made use of a similarly humorous approach. Introducing a new variant with a juniper flavour, the Savanna Jean Survivor made-for-online film poked fun at the trend of drinking infused drinks with pomp and ceremony, offering Savanna Jean as the down-to-earth but flavoursome alternative to flashy cocktails.
The Consol film tells the story of glass through alchemic reactions, cellular structure and firey cuts. It shows the development of glass and beer with shots of grains of sand and fire, wheat and rushing water.
“More than ever, advertising is about creating a bond with consumers on their own turf and inviting them to bring the brand into their lives,” concludes CEO Paul Jackson. “I’m exceptionally proud of the strategic and creative thinking that went into these four award-winning campaigns.”
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