Net#work named SA's best agency

Net#work won the competition's mid-size agency of the year in 2004. Also named as finalists were FCB Cape Town, Grey Worldwide and King James.

The AdFocus awards, sponsored by the SABC, were held at the Sandton Convention Centre last night, Monday, 9 May 2005, and sought to recognize agencies for achievements and advances in areas of growth, transformation and creativity.

In the overly long ceremony, where guests had to wait until almost midnight for the announcement of Agency of the Year, there seemed to be much emphasis on other industry awards, ie, Roger Garlick Awards, the Creative Circle winners, and so on.

The highlight of the evening, the announcement of Interbrand Sampson's top South African brand, by value, should have had its own massive showcase - something the Marketing Federation of SA (MFSA) will do for this fascinating research at the "Marketing Winter School", running alongside Markex and including the Marketing Excellence Awards, in early-June.

It was nice to have all the significant industry awards and events tied neatly together in one night, including more info on the upcoming controversial Loerie Awards, in an elegant setting, but nice doesn't build your brand and the Financial Mail brand was completely overshadowed by all this extraneous activity in a somewhat confusing series ceremonies. Although maybe the evening needed to be filled out a bit, now that there are only three awards categories...

Those who managed to keep their yawns at bay long enough to stay past pudding to the big announcement at the end may have realised there was an after-party hosted by the winning agency across at the Square. Many didn't know about it.

Close to 80 agencies across all disciplines entered this year's awards, which according to Jeremy Maggs, editor of AdFocus and FM's media and marketing pages, is a 15% increase on the previous year, even though the award categories have been halved to just three. The reason for this, says Maggs in a press release, is that the judging panel felt "that 'award inflation' had crept into the competition". The awards have therefore been consolidated into three main categories, namely Agency of the Year, Media Agency of the Year and Specialist Agency of the Year.

Added to these are the Agency Leader of the Year, Media Owner of the Year, Lifetime Achievement and the FM's New Broom Awards.

Commenting on the winners, Maggs said Net#work has now entrenched itself as the pre-eminent agency in the country that has the ability to fuse creative thinking with innovative strategic planning.

He added that Nota Bene, named Media Agency of the Year typifies a new style of media agency that can combine intellect and creativity into the media buying discipline.
Also named as finalists in this category were OMD, The Media Shop, MediaCompete and Starcom.

Judges were unable to reach any consensus on a specialist or marketing agency of the year and did not name a winner. Finalists were HKLM, espial-go-to-market, Frontiers Group Africa, Trigger and Lesoba Difference.

This year's AdFocus annual, published with Financial Mail on 13 May, profiles all entrants who are also rated on a score of 1 - 9 based on business and creative success and transformation progress.

The full list of this year's AdFocus winners is:

Agency of the Year: Net#work BBDO
Media Agency of the year: Nota Bene
Agency Leader of the Year: Keith Shipley
Media Owner of the Year: Primedia
Lifetime Achievement: Nkwenkwe Nkomo
FM's New Broom Award: Wingwing Mdlulwa