Chiat Sweeps Ad Awards Competition : Advertising: The Venice agency takes home 13 Beldings--the West Coast’s top prize for creativity--for its Energizer campaign.
Eveready’s ever-rambling rabbit rolled off Thursday evening with the West Coast’s top honor in advertising.
The drum-beating rabbit, which unexpectedly zips in and out of various commercials for Energizer batteries, won the coveted “Sweepstakes” prize at the Los Angeles Advertising Club’s 24th Annual Belding Awards ceremony at the Century Plaza Hotel.
Chiat/Day/Mojo, the Venice agency that created the campaign, not only won the top prize but also took home a dozen other Belding Awards. At the same time, the agency’s New York office also was celebrating on Thursday its winning of the $20-million to $30-million Calvin Klein cosmetics account. It will create and place ads for the fragrances Obsession and Eternity. This marks the first time that Calvin Klein has hired an outside agency to create any of its ads.
Meanwhile, Chiat/Day/Mojo’s local Belding Awards domination marked one of the best-ever showings by an agency at the West Coast’s so-called Oscars of advertising. The contest is limited to agencies with offices in Southern California.
“It’s always nice to be recognized by your peers,” said Bob Wolf, chairman and chief executive of Chiat/Day/Mojo’s North American operations. “It tells the creative community this agency is a pretty neat place to work,” he said in an interview.
The Eveready bunny has rolled in and out of phony commercials for everything from coffee to nasal spray while an announcer says, “Nothing outlasts the Energizer. They keep going and going and going.”
The bunny has also been lampooned by David Letterman and Johnny Carson. And when a regional Ford dealer association on the East Coast recently ran a Ford Bronco over an Energizer bunny look-alike in a TV spot, the ad was forced off the air by viewer complaints.
The Belding competition--named after the late Don Belding of the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding--awarded 57 silver Belding bowls to winners after receiving a record 2,006 entries.
Aside from Chiat/Day/Mojo, only a few agencies won more than a single award. Among them: Ketchum Advertising for its newspaper ads for Acura and billboard ads for Bear Mountain Ski Resort; and Hill Holliday Wakeman DeForrest for radio spots for PacTel Cellular and brochures for Infiniti.
But it was Chiat/Day/Mojo, which also won awards for its Nissan and Eye Care Centers of America campaigns, that overshadowed all others in the competition that was for the first time judged by ad executives from outside California. And it was a return to glory for Chiat/Day/Mojo, which had not won the competition’s top prize for several years.
Last year’s big winner, Rubin Postaer & Associates, was again regarded as a contender for the top prize this year. The agency created the commercial for American Honda that shows a man in an art gallery who is so impressed by an Accord automobile he sees hanging like a picture on the wall that he steps into it and drives off. That ad failed to beat the Eveready bunny but it did win this year’s Belding for best 30-second car commercial.
Notably absent from the list of car TV-spot winners was the Los Angeles agency that created the highly publicized Infiniti ads. The pastoral spots--accompanied by an announcer who almost whispers--spend more time looking at natural settings than at the cars.
“We sort of expected that,” said Chuck Kushell, managing director of Hill, Holliday/Los Angeles, which opened its office here less than two years ago. “We’re obviously the new kid on the block. I don’t think we’ve earned our spurs yet.”
While Kushell said Eveready’s roving bunny is a “breakthrough idea,” he also suggested the campaign may run into some problems. “I wonder how well it registers the name Energizer?” he posed.
For competitive reasons, even Eveready won’t directly respond to that question. An Eveready spokesman declined to say how much Energizer sales have increased since the campaign began last year. “All I can tell you is we are meeting and exceeding our expectations for sales here in the U.S.,” said the spokesman, Patrick Farrell.
A recent telephone poll of more than 1,000 adults nationwide conducted by Telephone Caravan Service for Adweek magazine rated the Energizer ads among the top 10 TV commercials.
It wasn’t Chiat/Day/Mojo that originally created the bunny but the Chicago office of rival agency DDB Needham Worldwide. That agency, however, never got the big idea to send the bunny roaming into other commercials. In DDB Needham spots, the rabbit simply beat its drum longer than mechanical rabbits powered by other batteries.
“I hate to say it, but while our Chicago office launched the rabbit, they never figured out the best thing to do with it,” said Dave Park, president of the Los Angeles office of DDB Needham and chairman of the Belding Awards committee. “This year, Chiat/Day did better work than I can ever remember them doing.”
That didn’t happen by accident, said Chiat/Day/Mojo’s Wolf. Two years ago a special meeting was called at Chiat/Day/Mojo’s Venice office. “We saw that the Los Angeles office wasn’t doing the best work for Chiat/Day,” said Wolf, who noted that the agency’s New York office was winning most of the creative laurels for ads for clients such as NYNEX and Arrow.
So the Venice office set a goal of outshining the New York office. Every employee at Chiat/Day/Mojo’s Venice office even has a T-shirt that says, “Good enough is not enough.” Said Wolf, “That’s not just a slogan.”
