We had submitted before
A few years ago Mike and I met working at an advertising agency. One of the first projects we collaborated on outside of work was submitting work to the National Advertising Challenge. We had a couple cool concepts and ended up submitting them. Although we didn’t win any awards or even a Merit that year, participating in the competition is what brought us together as a creative team.
In case you’re not familiar with the National Advertising Challenge, basically it’s a brief based creative competition. Big brand sponsors like McDonald’s, Canada Post, Home Depot, etc. submit briefs for a marketing challenge within their organization that they want solved. Once all the briefs go live on the NAC website, creatives from across the country have about one month to put together their concepts to submit. It’s a great format for competition and really levels the playing field because it all comes down to who has the best ideas.
We felt really good about our work this year
This year we went through all the briefs and came up with 2 really good submissions for both McDonald’s and Canada Post. We were feeling super confident in our work and on a bit of a whim decided to actually fly out to Toronto and attend the Awards Gala. We documented the whole experience in a short video.
We’re heading to Cannes!
We ended up winning Gold for our Canada Post submission in the Direct Mail category. Gold winners at the NAC receive a trip to Cannes and a four day pass to attend the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. So we’re heading there next month! We couldn’t be more pumped to go to this renowned festival and get inspired by some the best creative work in the world. And as far as timing goes, it’s an awesome way for us to start this new agency.
We’re definitely looking forward to submitting again next year and would recommend anyone who hasn’t before to have a look at the briefs when they go live and give it a shot. At the very least you might make something cool for your portfolio and have some fun coming up with ideas for big national brands.
