We’ll continue to feature some of this year’s most noteworthy Hermes Creative Awards entries throughout the competition.
Organization: CMBell Location: Walla Walla, WA Title of Entry: “Visit Walla Walla | America’s Best Wine Region” Category: 169.Electronic Media / Social Media / Interactive Media | Video | Nonprofit
Ever been to Walla Walla, Washington? After viewing this video you might want to go. CM Bell is a family-owned agency, located near Walla Walla, which prides itself on creative communications in marketing, video, and web. Promotional videos are usually more gloss than content; this one by CM Bell brings you a sense of place utilizing ordinary people doing ordinary things. No chic models, no color-saturated staged shots. It’s a low-key approach in a hyped field. The video brings a smile to your face and a desire to experience what this town has to offer.
Organization: YR Media Location: Oakland, CA Title of Entry: “Unadopted” Category: Video Production | Long Form Video | 605. Documentary
More than 400,000 kids are in foster care across America every year and many will never get adopted. Noel Anaya was one of those. After aging out of the system and being emancipated at age 21, he began a journey to find out why. His efforts led to his heart-wrenching documentary “Unadopted”. It was produced under the umbrella of the YR Media group, a national network of young journalists who collaborate and provide content for organizations like NPR and the New York Times. This is a very personal story of Noel’s search for the truth, which eventually leads him back to his foster parents and biological mother. Along the way, he introduces the audience to other foster kids who also never found a ‘forever’ home. The documentary is open, honest, and emotional delivering a powerful message in an understated voice.
Organization: ViacomCBS Location: Hollywood, CA Title of Entry: “Ru’s Angels” Category: Digital Marketing | Marketing, Digital | 3c. Social Campaign ($175)
Movie reboots are hard to create and equally as hard to promote. Superman and Batman are obviously the exceptions. What about Charlie’s Angels? The television series was a 1970’s phenomenon with Farrah Fawcett and all that hair. In 2000 the series was made into a movie with a sequel. In 2019, producers took another shot at the franchise. To promote the film, Sony turned too…RuPaul. In a short promotional film, RuPaul and his queens turned into “Angels” to track down a wig thief. The film hit the target audience generating 25.3 million total impressions, 3.7 million video views, and 501K engagements.
Organization: The Distillery Ltd Location: Brighton, East Sussex Title of Entry: “Making 1-to-1 conversations possible at scale, with voundry, our personalisation engine” Category: Digital Video Creation | Digital Video Creation | 409. Other — Personalisation Engine
Did you know that the average person sees up to 10,000 ads every single day? To ensure its content gets the attention it deserves, distillery makes it personal using its own video personalisation engine voundry. Using consensual customer data, such as age, gender, or purchase habits, voundry can render hundreds of thousands of videos and GIFs in minutes to engage customers with messages that resonate with them on an individual level. One powerful example of what can be achieved with voundry is distillery’s most recent campaign for WaterAid, the NGO making clean water more readily available worldwide for drinking and other essential needs. Every year, WaterAid launches a challenge that asks Australians to “raise a glass to the one drink the world can’t live without”, aiming to raise funds for every one in nine people worldwide who do not have access to it. To help the NGO spread this important message, distillery turned a global water shortage crisis into a relatable issue: using voundry, distillery repurposed WaterAid’s existing video assets into 2,000 unique videos tailored to resonate with each individual recipient, addressing them by name, appealing to their specific reasons for joining the challenge, and reminding them of the need for donations. The personalised videos sent by email achieved the highest open and click-through rates of any others sent by WaterAid, making it the NGO’s most successful campaign yet and helping to raise funds for 785 million people in need.
