EFFIE Awards India 2020 winners and the ‘Ingenious Indian Ideas’

The Advertising Club India hosted the latest edition of EFFIE Awards India 2020 presented by Colors. Announced at a celebratory event at Taj Lands’ End, Mumbai, the awards that have become a benchmark of effectiveness and breakthrough brand and media strategies saw the entire media and advertising fraternity be a part of the event. Hindustan Unilever and Star India were adjudged joint winners as EFFIE Client of the Year, while McCann Worldgroup India and Ogilvy Group were jointly named EFFIE India Agency of the Year. The coveted Grand EFFIE was won by the 82.5 Communications for the Bisleri Packaged Drinking Water campaign – “Samajhdar Jante hai”.

Adgully caught up with some of the key winners to know about their campaign strategy and what gives them the winning edge.

L-R: Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Rahul Mathew, Dheeraj Sinha, Prasoon Joshi, Kunal Jeswani

Prasoon Joshi, Chairman – McCann Wordgroup APAC and CEO and CCO, McCann Worldgroup India:

“We are a tough agency and our edge is the trust and faith our clients have in us. Last year, business went through ups and downs, but we partnered them through all of that and gave them our best.

This victory would not have been possible without the great team that we have. Jitendar Dabass, our Strategic Planning Head, has done a great job of galvanising our approach towards insights. I congratulate all the creative directors at McCann for a job well done. We strongly believe in grooming talent in-house. We are a diverse agency with people who have a unique style of working but are led by a common vision.

I take great pride that McCann was ranked the No. 1 global agency by Adage this year, which means that we have a global culture of excellence. I feel proud to be part of the global leadership team led by Harris Diamond and Rob Reily whose vision is aligned.

A common vision and diversity in approach has worked wonderfully for our agency. We are present in different markets around the globe which are culturally different. Our approach is to bring global learnings to local insights. This is a unique and rare balance.”

Kunal Jeswani, CEO, Ogilvy India:

“Every year we come to win. I genuinely believe it is about winning on specific stuff for specific clients. Being the Agency of the Year is great, but it is not the focus. The focus is to produce work that is effective for all of our largest clients and it feels great to see so many of our clients winning today.”

Rahul Mathew, National Creative Director, DDB Mudra Group

“Since we are a young agency, we are hungrier. We don’t have names to throw into a room and that motivates us to work harder. When we walk into a room we better have the best work because we don’t have anything else to sway decisions in our favour.

I would like to call us a ‘work in progress’ agency. In 2019, we won and worked for clients like McDonalds, NBA, TikTok, Bumble, Diageo, Hotstar and Facebook. Our young energy is reflected in the kind of clients we are winning. We are an agency looking towards the future with new age clients.

I joined this agency six years ago because of the work Baumbach did. He said that ‘Creativity is the most powerful force in a business’ and we believe that every day. It is great creativity that has brought us these results and put us in a sweet spot we all like.”

Dheeraj Sinha, Chief Strategy Officer, Leo Burnett:

“For us, it was a fantastic show because we won for brands across categories. We had 38 shortlists across 20 brands, meaning that we have a culture of effectiveness and creativity. That, to my mind, is a testimony to what Leo Burnett has built over a period of time. We did stellar work for clients like Spotify, HDFC, Jeep and P&G. It has been an absolutely fantastic year; we’ve won 34 new pitches, with a disproportionate set of new age clients because of our positioning as India’s No. 1 new age agency. We work with data, technology and new age ad formats and commensurate to that we have won these new businesses.”

Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Chairman & CCO, 82.5 Communications:

“As you can see, I have ‘Ingenious Indian Ideas’ written on my T-shirt and that’s what 82.5 Communications is all about. Today was our night, because we won the Grand Effie. Being an India-first agency working on a fabulous Indian brand and winning our first Grand Effie for such a client feels fantastic. An MNC might have used a man in a lab coat to recommend water, but we said no – a camel is the biggest influencer! That’s an ‘Ingenious Indian Idea’.”

Also Read:

HUL, Star India, McCann Worldgroup, Ogilvy, 82.5 shine at EFFIE Awards India 2020

Effies 2019: McCann is Agency of the Year; HUL adjudged Client of the Year