Tuesday 7th June saw this year's edition of The Drum Roses Awards, celebrating some of the finest work from outside of London. The in-person and live-streamed awards ceremony took place in Revolución de Cuba, Manchester where the judge's results were revealed. The Grand Prix went to Let's Go There – Summer Olympics by BBC Creative, Salford.
Below is a round-up of some of the highlights, vaguely connected with print and posters.
Poster by Bray Leino for Barilla
🥈 Silver
Barilla is Italy’s no.1 pasta brand, known and loved for its commitment to authenticity, quality and sustainability. But in the UK, awareness and sentiment is low, with the branded pasta category dominated by more familiar names – albeit with far smaller claims to true Italian provenance. We needed to appeal to foodie UK consumers’ taste for authenticity by conveying Barilla’s ‘Intensely Italian’ nature. To do this, we channelled Italian style and elegance through a set of playful illustrations. These combine classic pasta shapes with icons of Italy – from a Tuscan village atop a winding hill of fusilli to a leaning tower of penne – the colour scheme and composition mimicking the pack architecture.
Poster by RBH Creative Communications for The Willoughby Book Club
🥈 Silver
After ten years in business, Leicester-based book subscription service The Willoughby Book Club had done little advertising. They came to us to dip their toes in the water, after having had some exposure when their service was chosen as a gift to 10 Downing Street, when the Prime Minister’s second child was born. Willoughby’s brief was to find them more prominence in their home city, where they had surprisingly limited awareness. We developed an OOH campaign to do just that.
Most Creative Use of Media by Tangerine for Specsavers
🥇 Gold
It almost came home for England during Euro 2020. And thanks to one clever, perfectly timed billboard (which was actually just a simple mocked-up image posted on Twitter) it certainly came home for Specsavers. Far from being a one-hit-wonder, this seemingly simple tweet was part of a sustained Euros reactive strategy, creative use of media which extended beyond the realms of Twitter, across press & OOH bringing huge value to the Specsavers brand and joy to millions.
6, 4 or Smaller Sheet Poster by RBH Creative Communications for Young People First
🥈 Silver
Our client, YPF, works to inspire young people to reach their full potential and overcome personal barriers preventing them from achieving. Almost everyone has experienced the injustice of being negatively labelled at some point when we were young. It’s comments like “You won’t amount to anything” and the attitudes such comments reflect that can limit young people’s self-belief. Working off this insight, we created a campaign using prominent figures from the past who had experienced significant challenges in their youth – making the point that everyone should have the right to realise their full potential, no matter what their background.
48 or 96 Sheet Poster by Genesis for Public Health Agency NI
🥇 Gold
This OOH dramatises the idea that most second-hand smoke is invisible. The unsettling visual shows a car's young passenger unwittingly engulfed in smoke. This health risk is the reason it's now illegal to smoke in a vehicle if anyone in it is under 18.
6, 4 or Smaller Sheet Poster by TBWA\MCR for Papyrus - Prevention of Young Suicide
🥉 Bronze
TBWA\MCR work closely with PAPYRUS – Prevention of Young Suicide charity. We’d found that the pandemic lockdowns of 2020/2021 had hit young people’s mental health particularly hard. Many of them struggle to know who they could talk to about suicidal feelings, so instead they would just mask how they felt. Papyrus asked us to create a simple powerful message that showed young people that they no longer had to cover how they felt, and that Papyrus was there to provide them with help, advice and support.
Press Advert by TBWA\MCR for Papyrus - Prevention of Young Suicide
🥉 Bronze
After undertaking research with 11–19-year-olds, PAPYRUS found that the huge pressure around exams was contributing to an unprecedented decline in the mental health of young people. They wanted to reach out with a message of hope, promoting their own suicide Hopeline service to those young students in need. We created a piece of work that was designed to challenge the common academic mantra ‘Your grades will determine your future’ and instead show students, there should always be life beyond schooling.
Item of Self Promotion by Music
🥉 Bronze
If we’ve learnt anything since March 23rd 2020, it’s been the value of seizing the day. Of course, that’s been easier said than done since life under restrictions. But we’ve all tried our best. And so, we created a 2022 diary that captured moments and reflections from one of the corresponding days from 2020 or 2021. Mining our own data from January 2020 up to December 2021, we compiled 365 entries from emails, Teams channels, texts, WhatsApp messages, NHS apps and health records, news articles, social media, and human memory. Together, they reflect us as an agency, and the weird journey we’ve been on – from our blissfully ignorant social and working lives, to a smaller company wary of the new normal via cat stalkers, homeschooling nightmares, Family Zoom quizzes, fitness fails, paint can audits and a lot of music, films and TV.
Item of Self Promotion by Bauer Create
🥈 Silver
We created an initial promotional piece in 2020 for Scotland’s Male Euro Qualifying campaign to promote Bauer’s radio coverage. It was really well received and achieved our highest viral reach of the year across social platforms. In the build up to the 2021 tournament finals, Bauer’s programming team needed a follow-up piece to hype and promote their coverage of Scotland’s Euros campaign – their first finals appearance in 23 years. ‘We Always Go Together’ became Bauer’s call to arms, soundtracked by a bespoke composition of the famous Scottish folk song 'Wild Mountain Thyme'.
Direct Mail from James Cropper – Illustration by Dorien Brouwers
🥉 Bronze
To coincide with our partnership with the Wainwright Literary Prize for writing on Nature and Conservation, the Wainwright Colours from Nature collection is the latest innovation in the James Cropper paper portfolio to create value from waste streams. This capsule collection of papers is made with 100% recycled fibre certified to the FSC® recycled label and dyed with an non-edible extract from Rosemary. Designed primarily for the packaging and publishing sectors, the collection offers a bleed-free and rub resistant paper with lightfastness comparable to that achieved with industry standard synthetic dyes. The papers in the collection are inherently biodegradable, should they end up in the environment. However, recycling is always recommended so that the valuable paper fibre can be given another useful life. The Wainwright Colours are available from stock, however the naturally derived dye technology can be applied to bespoke projects through James Cropper’s Tailor Made papermaking service.
Outdoor Campaign by Drummond Central for Greggs
🥉 Bronze
This outdoor campaign used a motel-inspired roadside sign - featuring new twists on familiar restaurant phrases - to show that, unlike most of their competitors, a Greggs Outside Eating Area is wherever you want it to be.
Congratulations to all the winners, hope there aren’t too many sore heads this morning. You can see the full list of winners here or follow The Drum Awards on social media here.
Unusually, the event was sponsored by GB News which feels like an unusual sponsor for such an event. The controversial right-wing news network, described as the Fox News of the UK, launched last year and has been criticised for its partisan and, at times, problematic reporting on news. I reached out to The Drum for a comment on their partnership:
GB News... are extremely supportive of the regions, with Manchester being one of their most popular markets. With their support, we ran the awards in-person (as well as streaming virtually to the world), enabling our wonderful industry to come together and celebrate creative excellence.
Why The Drum Roses Awards wishes to align itself with such an organisation is a mystery as, in my opinion, it seems to go against the values of a lot of creatives within the industry.
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