Hunt Lascaris knocked off top creative spot

The standings are based on results so far, which take in the Clios, The One Club Show, the D&AD, and the Ad of the Month awards up to April.

At the mid-year point, Net#work has garnered 4 600 Creative Circle points, followed by Ogilvy's 4 420 and Hunt Lascaris's 4 215. And it's not as if Hunt Lascaris had a bad year - its point-count for 2004 is 36% better than it was at the same stage last year.
Finance Week marketing editor Tony Koenderman, writing in his Koenderman's AdVenture section, points out that the South African advertising industry as a whole, improved by 40 percent over the same stage of 2003.

The biggest of the international awards festivals, the Cannes Lions, takes place later this month, and hopes are high that SA will perform well there as well. The results are based on a points table prepared by the Creative Circle. Points are allocated to each level of award at recognised festivals to make possible comparative evaluations. This means, for example, that a Loerie Grand Prix (350 points) is considered equivalent to a Silver Lion at Cannes, and almost equal to a Clio Gold (375).

This year, for the first time, the Creative Circle is allocating points for the Ad of the Month, but a category winner there is worth only 20 points, so the inclusion has made no
difference to the standings.

In order, the top 10 are:
1. Net#work BBDO
2. Ogilvy
3. TBWA Hunt Lascaris
4. Saatchi & Saatchi
5. Daddy Buy Me a Pony
6. Jupiter Drawing Room
7. FCB
8. Lowe Bull
9. HerdBuoys McCann-Erickson
10. TBWA Gavin Reddy.

Hunt Lascaris has reigned almost unchallenged as SA's leading winner of creative awards for most of the past decade, and last year it scored more than twice as much as the second-ranked agency, Jupiter. "It's unlucky to lose its position in a year when its point score rose so much, but the year is not yet over, and the agency may recover lost ground in the Loeries, through the sheer volume of its work," writes Koenderman.
Others still to come, among the awards festivals endorsed by the Creative Circle, are the Loeries (October), the Eagles (November) and the Ad of the Year.

A big factor in Ogilvy's renaissance has been the acquisition of executive creative director Jerry Human, who joined the agency when his own shop, HarrisonHuman Bates, became a victim of the worldwide closure of Bates. Clearly, Human has the knack of producing award-winning advertising, and also of choosing the kinds of clients for whom such work can be done. Several of Ogilvy's awards were for clients which came with the acquisition of HarrisonHuman, most notably Exclusive Books.

The full table of results will be published in Finance Week this week.