FCB Chicago Wins Inaugural Alan Page Award for Writing at Cresta Awards
Cresta has announced FCB Chicago as the winner of its first annual Alan Page Award for Writing, a new honour created to celebrate the most outstanding writing in advertising. The award goes to ‘The Last Barf Bag’, a project from Dramamine, the motion-sickness prevention brand, which celebrates the curious (and now endangered) hobby of collecting airline nausea bags.
The integrated campaign by FCB Chicago won four Gold trophies in the 2024 Cresta Awards competition but has now been selected by a special jury to receive the overall writing excellence prize. The recognition specifically honors a 13-minute documentary that serves as a key component of the campaign.
Page, who died in 2023, was an award-winning creative director and copywriter. The Page family, together with Lewis Blackwell, Cresta’s CEO, created the new award to honor his memory and celebrate the craft of writing—an area in which he excelled, and which he was passionate about championing for new talent and innovation.
Monique Kaplan, executive creative director at FCB Chicago, was thrilled to receive the award on behalf of the creative team. “Writing is so important in advertising, it's a craft that really can take your work from good to incredible. But at times it can seem like it’s a bit of a dying craft – everything is ‘idea first’, which I fully support but when you can come up with incredible ideas and you have the writing skill to turn them into magic, it’s gold. There’s nothing better.”
The long-form documentary format was new for both agency and client, representing an exciting departure from the traditional 30-second ad. “We did some digging, and it was ‘wow, this is pretty amazing. I can’t believe this community [of barf bag collectors] exists!’ And it was coincidence after coincidence because we discovered that the barf bag was invented in 1949, and Dramamine was invented in 1949, and we pieced this entire story together.”
The writing process was also a fresh challenge, with a script outline prepared before shooting but then rewritten after seeing the footage. “The script is kind of a loose narrative of what we want. But if we capture magic on the day, that's going to change things, because we're going to make sure we capture that” said Taylor Walker, account lead on Dramamine. Taylor noted that it was a four-month endeavor, involving hundreds of pages of transcript that shaped the wider campaign’s language.
Although the film is as funny as some of the best mockumentaries, Walker and Kaplan are keen to stress that it is a genuine documentary. “That was something we knew was going to be contentious. Like, ‘is this for real?’. It was important for us that it's a documentary. It's real. This is real stuff. This is real people. I mean, there's nothing about it that's actually made up,” they emphasised.
The project’s success has emboldened the team to experiment with other formats. “Yeah, we’ve got the bug! Absolutely, I think it's raised the bar, everybody's, like ‘well, is it as good as Dramamine?’”
Lewis Blackwell, Cresta’s CEO, added, “We’re delighted that such an original, enjoyable work emerged from our various deliberations to be recognized for the first Alan Page Award. It’s a lovely piece of work, full of warmth, humor and empathy. The writing is immense and yet almost invisible. It creates a framework for a story to be explored and then shapes it into a perfect construction that says a lot but seemingly without trying.”
Lewis also explained that the special writing honor was intentionally announced later than the other awards. “We asked a range of people, from varying creative backgrounds to act as jurors for this special award, as well as drew on some of the regular jurors. It took a little while for what was ultimately a unanimous winner to emerge. And then it seemed right to announce it as the last point of the awards cycle…and just ahead of our new call for entries!”
Cresta Awards 2025 is open for entries from 11 February until 20 July.
View ‘The Last Barf Bag’ here.
