APN Outdoor last night held their first annual digital Outdoor creative challenge, with Pixel361° coming to fruition in Auckland. The evening kicked off to a great start at Seafarers Club on Auckland’s Quay Street, where representatives from the 53 registered teams gathered to find out their fate, with the top teams ultimately battling it out for the top spot.
Having had limited time to register and submit finished artwork in response to last week’s briefing, the APN Outdoor team have been overwhelmed with the response from market and the callibre of admissions received.
It was no easy feat for the illustrious judging panel that was chaired by Colenso’s Nick Garrett and included Damon Stapleton – DDB, Richard Thompson – Contagion, Phil Clemas – APN Outdoor and Sanjay Manandhar from Boston-based digital software developer Aerva, who were tasked with cutting down the entries to just six finalists who were to present their campaign.
The finalist pool of teams including representatives from DDB, Us&Co, OMD and Contagion Ltd, were invited to pitch their ideas live with an allotted time slot of three minutes only. With the subject matter ranging from tugging heart-strings to tech-savvy concepts, the judges had a difficult task to determine which teams met the brief best and whose campaign most aptly communicated the Men’s Health Trust goal to provoke men to make healthier lifestyle choices starting today.
Phil Clemas, General Manager- APN Outdoor commented on the event “We had high hopes for the competition, but have been truly blown away with the entrants’ final artwork. The process of judging was challenging, with so many campaigns demonstrating the vastly untapped potential of great creative executions in our digital environments. The concepts truly embraced the mediums’ unique attributes of immediacy, contextual relevance and integration and we are very excited to share them.” Top spot, taking home the coveted prize of a trip to SXSW held in Austin, Texas in March 2016 went to Nick Dellabarca and Liz Richards of DDB. The prize includes travel and accommodation for two as well as $500 spending money with the winning campaign also being granted $100,000 worth of APN Outdoor’s media space to bring the winning campaign to life in 2016. Overwhelmed with the win Nick said, “It’s a great prize for an even greater cause”.
Highly Commended and People’s Choice Award was awarded to Aaron Carbines and Mike Felix of Us&Co who will each take home a $500 travel voucher and a Canon digital camera.
Pixel 361° was developed in-house by APN Outdoor and invited creative minds from across the industry to design a campaign for the high profile charity Men’s Health Trust, using APN Outdoor’s suite of Digital products.
APN Outdoor would like to thank all those who entered and participated as well as the judging panel who helped to make the evening memorable and are very much looking forward to making Pixel 361° an annual event.