Three Minute Happiness

James Cooper

The results are in from the end of year stuff. Well, actually the results were in more than 24 hours ago but give me a break - I'm not sure what exactly happened in the last 24 hours because I have been mostly drunk.

First up the top 10 digital ads of the year. I predicted that only one would come from a traditional agency and I was kind of right. AMV's hands got in there at no.5 but it seems that was actually done by iChameleon so we'll give that a 1/2 shall we? Our Malkovich work for Vaio got no.2 but that was obviously done in conjunction with Fallon, so a 1/2 point there too. The only piece of digital work done by a bone fide traditional agency was the 02 Cocoon Blog, so congrats to Steve and his team at VCCP.

Generally I don't think it was a great year. There is some nice work on the list but nothing that I feel wildly jealous about not doing  - which as a creative is always the real test. Actually, I lie, I would have loved to have done Poke's Spot the Bull site. I'm not sure anything will win a Pencil or Lion. But who knows? Probably Poke's work will come closest. Personally, getting beaten to the no.1 spot by the future Mrs Three Minute Happiness' facebook app for O2 was great for promoting harmony at the Cooper / Lariu household. Our cat is also hugely proud of us.

From a Dare point of view we had 3 of the top 10 last year and just one this year but we managed to do the Agency of the Year double picking up both Campaign and Marketing gongs. So consistency rather than individual brilliance has been the name of the game. And actually I am all for that. We are doing good work across all our clients, with whom we have extremely solid relationships. Therefore the blocks are in place so that when genius does strike we should be able to make the most of it.

On the Agency of the year stuff I think Poke did brilliantly to come second. Who doesn't like Poke? Iain and his blog seem to be the digital voice of (fun) reason and Wasserfall is just his brilliant old happy, bonkers, self. Congrats to them. I think Republic were a little bit hard done by not to be on the list. I know that consistency of senior management is a criteria for Campaign but I would have thought that the very fact that Martin, Paddy and Sandoz left and Republic still managed to put on business, churn out good work and win awards would have been worthy of note.

I should imagine I'll do another post or two before the end of the year and my end at Dare - including (just for Eduardo) a post about Another Anomaly and why I'm leaving. Until then, have a good Christmas and remember, Jesus is the reason for the season.