Who Won the 2024 Effie Awards Canada?
Just yesterday in downtown Toronto, an assortment of Canada’s cleverest creatives and marketers gathered together to attend The Institute of Canadian Agencies’ (ICA) Canadian Marketing Effectiveness Summit 2024.
As has been tradition for the past six years running, this also meant the reveal of this year’s Effie Awards winners – in what turned out to be the most competitive year yet for the event. With an 180% increase in first-time entrants from last year, as well as a 225% jump in entrants submitting from outside of Toronto, the only comparison to last year was the fact that once again, a mere four pieces of work had received Gold status and were in contention for the Grand Effie.
These were:
- ‘It’s Not the Same Without Your Buds’, a campaign by Anomaly Toronto for Budweiser which removed the ‘Bud’ from ‘Budweiser’ in order to emphasise the importance of addressing male loneliness.
- ‘Not Everyone’s Happy’, a campaign by Courage and Wavemaker for KFC in which a cantankerous Colonel Sanders sounded off against the introduction of ‘Twosdays’ (in which the brand sold chicken for the discounted price of $2.99).
- ‘Feel Out Loud’, an initiative by McCann Canada for Kids Help Phone which not only was the largest ever campaign focused on Canadian youth mental health, but also enabled all new levels of accessibility for the organisation’s services.
- ‘It Starts with Wonder’, a campaign by Rethink for Wonder Bread which helped re-glamourise the brand’s reputation by turning ‘trademark violations’ into official merch and stars of the campaign.
While all four were stars in their own right, only one could win. And, as it turned out, that piece of work was ‘Feel Out Loud’, which saw the representatives from McCann and Kids Help Phone take to the stage to claim the coveted prize.
‘Dominance’ might be the only appropriate word to describe what followed. Shortly thereafter, the president of Environics Analytics Canada, Jan Kestle, would announce that Kids Help Phone had also won Marketer of the Year, after which Jess MacDermot, global portfolio director of Haymarket Media Group confirmed that McCann had also brought home Agency of the Year, not only for the success of this campaign, but also its work with six other advertisers.
Offering her congratulations to all the other cases that’d made it this far, AJ Jones, chief strategy officer of McCann Canada expressed her pride over the work coming out of the country, and her delight at having had the chance to play a part in this. “This is a huge shock for all of us – these guys are probably like ‘We’ve never seen AJ speechless before’,” she said. “We feel really lucky that we have clients who believe in effectiveness, that are invested in it, and trust us to guide their brands through what are turbulent times. We think we have a strong effectiveness culture, and we’ll continue to push ourselves and be pushed by the rest of the work that is coming out of Canada as well.”
Canadian Case Studies May Still Need Work… But We Should Celebrate Regardless
While the day would also feature three panel sessions coordinated by the ICA – one on economics, one on business, and one on marketing – each with its own prestigious speakers, the affairs wrapped up with an address by Scott Knox, president and chief executive officer of the ICA. Herein, he praised all the entrants and the country as a whole, emphasising just how much the country’s industry has grown since he first moved here from England eight years ago.
“I moved here not for the industry, and when I left, I had people say to me, ‘Awe, they’re nice over there, aren’t they? Do they have any agencies? Oh, they’ve got three agencies! We didn’t know that!’. Now, look at the statistics of our performance on the global stage. Look at the work we’re scoring, and what we’re delivering. Now is the time for us to knock it out of the park!”
That being said, he reiterated his own analysis from last year’s event – that to this day, Canada still really needs to get hotter on how to write case studies.
“I watched case studies that I knew because I sat with the agencies who made them, and watched them drop in judging because the case study wasn’t strong enough,” he critiqued. “We do amazing stuff, and it’s about time we got out there and sold it.”
Building on this, he stated that the Canadian industry is an economic multiplier, and that for every one dollar spent, six is returned to the GDP. So, with that in mind, he thanked everyone for their hard and exceptional work over the past 12 months, before concluding with a strong message.
“We want to see brands do their business from the global market perspective in Canada, because we can do it, and we’re better at it.”
