3 Yahoo! Big Idea Chairs conferred on winning agencies

New York, NY – May 1, 2008 – The Art Directors Club revealed an unprecedented three winners in the ADC Hybrid category of its 87th Annual Awards at tonight’s Annual Award Gala, held at the ADC Gallery in Manhattan. The Gala also celebrated the Annual Awards winners in the categories of Advertising, Interactive, ADC Design Sphere, Design, Photography and Illustration, which were also announced. The Art Directors Club is the first creative collective of its kind with global membership in advertising, design and visual communications disciplines.

The ADC Hybrid winners earned the newly recast ADC HYBRID Cube award for their groundbreaking innovation; entries were also presented with the Yahoo! Big Idea Chair.

“Moving beyond integration, ADC’s Hybrid category now recognizes the most innovative, groundbreaking communications that utilize multiple media platforms and/or transcend conventional uses of media,” said Ami Brophy, Executive Director of the Art Directors Club.

ADC HYBRID CUBE winning work included:
Wieden+Kennedy’s Beijing City Attack, Nike, China
Projector Inc.’s UNIQLOCK, UNIQLO, Japan
Anomaly’s, iPhone Launch, Keep A Child Alive, USA

The award winning concepts while dissimilar were chosen for their innovation and creative excellence:

- Leveraging Beijing basketball players’ sense of superiority and arrogance referred to as ‘BaQi’, W+K devised a tournament and campaign to reflect ‘BaQi’ basketball. ‘Imperial Basketball’ was the result, named after the gates that surround the Forbidden City, and The Battle of the 9 Gates was an epic three-day competition. Only the best played the final inside the Forbidden City. News of the event spread using a variety of traditional and creative media. The title became the war cry of the campaign: Beijing City Basketball Young Master.

- The clothing retailer, UNIQLO sought to build international brand awareness and to promote its expansion in the global marketplace. Projector Inc. answered with UNIQLOCK after identifying 70 million worldwide blogs as a powerful, preexisting buzz building media tool. The agency created a functional, entertaining blog widget for bloggers to help spread the UNIQLO brand globally. The campaign concept fused a clock that functioned as a blog utility with time signaling music and dance performance videos featuring UNIQLO clothing. This seamlessly branded widget automatically became a popular tool connecting UNIQLO with its target.

Lastly, Anomaly ingeniously seized the impending launch of the new iPhone - the world's most anticipated technology launch of the decade - as their opportunity to get Keep a Child Alive in and on the news, in front of their target group’s favorite technology, gossip, local news and mass media outlets. Central to the plan, the KCA team lined up for four days and nights to get the first iPhone in the world. This team was ultimately covered by blogs, and hundreds of media sources - creating nearly 20 million media impressions for KCA. In the final hour, KCA auctioned off their brilliantly gotten iPhone for $100,000 thereby also raising funds for the cause.

Jon Kamen Chairman and CEO of @radical.media served as ADC’s Hybrid Jury Chair and was joined by: Russell Davies, Partner, Open Intelligence Agency, John C. Jay, ECD and Partner, Wieden+Kennedy, Esther Lee, CEO of North America, President of Global Brands, Euro RSCG and Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer, GE.

“From the beginning, our team of judges decided that just being integrated wasn't enough for a campaign to be worthy of a Hybrid. Integration of different media should be a given for any relevant campaign. We quickly gravitated to campaigns that had a unique, creative spark as well as execution that was representative of the high standards of the Art Director's Club. We sought to recognize work that is iconic and scalable. Since the judging day, I keep finding myself thinking about a few of our honored campaigns -- talk about making an impression.” said Beth Comstock, ADC Hybrid Jury member and Chief Marketing Officer, GE.

The ADC also honored winners of the Corbis Creativity for Social Justice Award at the Gala. In its second year, the Corbis award carries a cash prize for the non-profit client of the top professional pro-bono entry in the ADC competition, and a scholarship for the top student pro-bono entry.

The 87th Annual ADC Awards mirrored the club’s international reach with work entered from more than 66 countries this year, 27 of which will be represented as winners in the annual, which will include all ADC Hybrid, ADC Sphere, Gold and Silver medalists, Distinctive Merit winners and Merit recipients. The hardcover Art Directors Annual 87 will be published by RotoVision in November, 2008.

A complete list of winners can be found at www.adcglobal.org. For a detailed list of winners and creative credits for top awards, please contact Jen Larkin at the ADC at jen@adcglobal.org

Media Contacts:
Ami Brophy, 212.643.1440 (abrophy@adcglobal.org)
Mimi Martinoski, 416.827.0537, (mimi@ihaveanidea.org)

About the ADC
Founded in New York in 1920 as the first creative collective of its kind, the Art Directors Club, Inc. (www.adcglobal.org) is a 501[c]3 not-for-profit organization with an international membership in advertising, design and related visual communications disciplines. ADC's core program - the international Annual Awards competition, exhibition and Art Directors Annual - is now in its 87^th year and remains unrivaled as an educational and industry resource. ADC's signature initiatives also include: ADC Young Guns biennial showcase of promising professionals age 30 and under; the ADC Hall of Fame; Saturday Career Workshops for talented city high school juniors; Designism, connecting designers to social causes; scholarships, exhibitions, speaker events, and original books and publications.