County’s Ad and PR Companies Strut Their Stuff at Awards Show : Advertising: Competition gives 102 agencies a chance to display their wares to each other and potential clients.
For the advertising firms of deYoung Ginsberg Weisman Bailey of Irvine and Salvati Montgomery Sakoda Inc. of Costa Mesa, Orange County’s 32nd annual AdClub AdAwards on Saturday night was a repeat performance with a slight twist.
Last year, not only did the two agencies take home the most honors, but dGWB also received almost twice as many awards as Salvati Montgomery. This year, dGWB was again the biggest winner with 65 honors, but Salvati Montgomery gained ground with 46 awards.
In fact, AdAwards Chairman Michael Maxsenti said it is debatable whether there was a clear-cut winner between the two agencies as dGWB took 13 gold, 13 silver and 35 merit awards, while Salvati Montgomery carted off a Best of Show award, 12 gold, 22 silver and 11 merit awards.
Roberts/Mealer/Cunningham Inc. of Costa Mesa was the third biggest winner with a Best of Show, six gold, four silver and eight merit honors.
There was a tie in the Best of Show for a broadcast ad. Salvati Montgomery’s was given the award for its television spot for Scripto, and Hill Holliday Wakeman DeForrest received one for its audio spots for PacTel Cellular.
In the print-media category, Roberts/Mealer took the Best of Show for its Teen Pregnancy Campaign for the Orange County Center for Health.
The Best of Show honor for collateral design--a category that includes annual reports, letterheads and other non-advertising projects--went to Irvine-based The Dot Printer, of which Maxsenti is vice president of sales. The award was for the Bank of San Pedro 1988 annual report and the client was the O’Mara Design Group.
Maxsenti said this year marked the first time that not all AdAwards judges were from California. Four of the eight ad executives were from the East Coast and the Midwest.
“We wanted balanced perspectives from outside the region,” he explained.
Maxsenti also said that a record-breaking 102 ad agencies entered this year’s competition to vie for the 226 awards in 107 categories.
Phil Joseph Salvati, president of Salvati Montgomery, said in a phone interview that it’s nice for people with creative talents to be recognized by their peers, and the AdAwards allow an agency to be recognized by potential business.
Dan Ginsberg, president of the 3-year-old dGWB, agreed.
“It’s nice to sit back with your clients one night and see your work measured by your own peers and let perspective clients see you’re doing good work,” he observed.
Ginsberg said dGWB has grown from a 13-person staff to 30 employees as it has branched out from doing high-technology work. The agency now has an annual billing of about $20 million.
One of dGWB’s non-high technology works was with the ROAR Foundation and its campaign to save the elephants from poachers seeking their ivory tusks. The campaign received four gold, two silver and four merit awards. One of them pictured an elephant with its trunk cut off and the words: “If you buy ivory, make sure they get all the blood off it first.”
Maxsenti said advertising is a vital link to the success of the local economy because Orange County businesses now also have to compete on an international level as TV shrinks the world into a global village. The AdAwards, he said, inform the community of what kind of advertising talent exists in the county.
“The AdAwards will let people see that there is creative work being done here,” Maxsenti said. “Hopefully, that will also attract more creative ad people into the area.”
