The Loeries African Roadshow Kicks off in Harare

The Loeries African Roadshow kicked off to a great start on 18 March at the Crown Plaza Monomotapa in Harare, Zimbabwe. The Loeries are Africa’s most prestigious brand communication awards and entries are open to everyone in the brand communication industry – marketers, agencies, designers, media owners and media agencies – across Africa and the Middle East.

The first stop of the roadshow was an all-round success, with around 180 attendees from Zimbabwe’s brand communication industry. Juliet Ziswa, Marketing Director for East and Southern Africa at Unilever, opened the event, with Praxie Dzangare, Chairperson of the Zimbabwe Accredited Advertising Practitioners Association (ZAAPA) welcoming the crowd and introducing the night’s speaker, Andrew Human, CEO of the Loeries.

The programme began with a fascinating collection of highlights from the Loeries Seminar of Creativity featuring several world leaders in the creative industry. Human then presented all the 2013 winners from the Africa & Middle East Category; he went on to explain the judging process, list the categories, and he provided tips on entering the awards. He spoke about innovation, quality of execution and how relevance to the target audience, brand and the chosen medium are all critical elements of great communication.

‘If you’re selling bottled water and all your competitors are selling bottled water,’ he said, ‘your only differentiator is to make yourself stand out. And to stand out you have to be different; recognisable. If you are doing creatively awarded work – you’re being innovative – and you will be eleven times more efficient in generating a market share increase than if you’re doing mediocre work the same as everybody else,’ Human continued, referencing James Hurman’s book, ‘The Case for Creativity’.

Breaking the programme into easily understandable sections, Human gave it a refreshingly simple and straightforward atmosphere. He offered six pivotal steps to winning an award:

Start with a great idea
Keep it simple
Don’t create work with the sole purpose of winning awards
Study the categories and know where to enter
A bad presentation can lose you an award
Make your statistics relevant

A new category for the 2014 Loerie Awards was announced – Service Design. This category is focused on the interaction between a brand and its customers, ‘This “last mile” of the customer experience can be vital in achieving sales, engaging new customers and building loyalty with existing customers,’ said Human.

Human took the opportunity to make the first announcement of five speakers at this year’s Seminar of Creativity taking place during Loeries Creative Week: John Mescall, Executive Creative Director at McCANN, Sydney; Ali Ali, a film director from Egypt; PJ Pereira, Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder, Pereira & O’Dell, San Francisco; Steven Doyle, Creative Director, Doyle Partners, New York City; and Arno Lindemann, Chief Creative Officer, Lukas Lindemann Rosinski, Hamburg.

Human also announced a special prize for the overall winner of Zimbabwe’s Ngoma Advertising Awards taking place in April: Complimentary entry into the Loeries for the overall winning piece, and complimentary Loeries Creative Week access for the award-winning team – with a total value of over R10 000.

At the end of the programme, visitors had an opportunity to network with their industry colleagues. Many attendees expressed their gratitude for a workshop of this kind because although there is a strong and thriving advertising community in Harare, access to this content was found to be really inspirational.

‘I was talking to some of the people who came through today and they were saying that they were amazed at how many Zimbabwean creatives have come out to this workshop,’Denford Mangora, CEO of Jericho Advertising said of the event. ‘The hunger, energy and drive displayed simply demonstrates that we do have passion for great creative work, which is then moulded by the things we’re being told today – here is what world-class people are doing, here is what it takes to get there with your campaigns and ideas.’

Key dates to remember:
Entry Deadline: 30 May
Loeries Creative Week Cape Town: 15-21 September
International Seminar of Creativity: 19 September
The Loerie Awards Ceremonies: 20-21 September

For more information go to loeries.com

IMAGE CAPTIONS:

Image 1- Denford Mangora, Jericho CEO and Praxie Dzangare, ZAAPA Chairperson

Image 2 -Juliet Ziswa, Marketing Director for East and Southern Africa at Unilever