Creative Cape Town

We were going to make the headline “a bird writes a book” but The Loeries already have dibs on showcasing South Africa’s new wild life talents. Besides, if you’ve been following the fame that is the Loeries, it was inevitable – the Loeries already hosts Africa’s “biggest” advertising and design ceremony, floods the streets with revellers once a year, and actively develops a culture of community in an industry of  competition.

Ok, The Loerie Awards is a competition, true, but there are so many prizes and the inspiration so in-your-face, that it hardly seems anyone loses. If you come away from it without new ideas, you’re very possibly in the wrong field. Which is tricky, because they’re expanding their own  field to support the wider arts, demonstrated in 2010, when the Awards partnered with Creative Cape Town to support Creative Week 2010.  But the big news is that the Loeries have gone literary with its own annual.

Like everything that bird does, the Loeries Annual is slick and heavyweight and packed with info on creativity in the commercial sector.

Keeping things in the open, the book reflects The Loerie Awards introducing the official ranking of the winners. It explains many of the Awards more mythological processes – how the rankings are calculated, elaborates on special awards, and goes on to detail the winning pieces comprehensively and visually.

And while it is not the Creative Cape Town mandate to have favourites, nor within its time-frame to pore over every single, scintillating winner, we did notice one in particular that featured an edginess, intelligence, awareness and innovation we’d probably call ‘creativity’ if we were writing the dictionary of design.

It is titled, “Selinah” for the Tospy Foundation, a  Public Service/Fundraising/Charity sector piece from Ogilvy Johannesburg. The advert takes the looks at day-by-day deterioration process in someone with a disease over 90 days (from healthy to emaciated). Nothing profound there, until you realise that this is a process being shown in reverse (from after to before) to reflect the positive effects on an HIV/AIDS patient taking antiretrovirals(ARVs). Brilliant, we think, relevant and well worth its Gold Award. Well done Robyn Bergmann, Vidette Kay, Stephanie van Niekerk, Bridget Johnson… OK, if you want the whole list, we suggest you get your hands on a copy of your own Annual!

For the sceptics who sniff at advertising (only to buy an Apple Mac because the president uses one), Advertising Jury Chairperson, Pablo del Campo (who is also CEO of Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Buenos Aires, no less) has a sobering suggestion. “Advertising sets trends,” he says in the Annual, “ lifestyles, the things we like, the things we wish to happen to us, the things we hate, the things we dream of…”

And before you laugh off the Loeries Awards or annual as being exclusively the territory of certain designers, writers and ideas-mongers at work in for-profit media, his thoughts on a quick trip to SA underline the overarching philosophy that “it is hard to believe the extent to which one may get to know a country and a region through its advertising.”

The annual is a gem of contemporary African productivity. It will, in its own time, become an archive of the cream of the advertising industry, but in this case, it’s not onnnn top, it’s inside.