DRIVEN wins best of show print at the D Awards

Universal Images takes best-in-show at the D Show awards
By Bill Shea
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CORRECTION APPENDED

Southfield-based visual effects and post-production house Universal Images took the best-in-show award Wednesday night at the third-annual D Show advertising awards.

The company was honored for its work on the History Channel's “The Art of War” series. Christopher Wirth was the executive creative director on the work, which was computer-generated, stylized images of warfare through the ages.

The D Awards — everything from traditional print and broadcast ads to guerrilla marketing, cell-phone campaigns and computer effects are eligible and judged by outside experts — must have been produced by a Detroit-based agency or client between June 1, 2008, and May 31 of this year.

Other overall category winners:

• Print: Ferndale-based Driven Solutions Inc. for Founders Brewing Co.

• Out of home: Dearborn-based Team Detroit for Ford Motor Co.

• TV: Warren-based Campbell-Ewald for Kaiser Permanente.

• Digital media: Team Detroit for Ford.

• Integrated branding: Campbell-Ewald for U.S. Navy.

• The Craft Award: Universal Images for the History Channel.

• Ambassador Award: Campbell-Ewald for U.S. Navy (awarded for best marriage of creative content and context innovation).

“The Joe” award, judged by a panel of advertising industry journalists (including this reporter), was given to McCann Erickson for its “Pure Michigan” campaign for the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

The journalist award is for the entry the panel believes rose above all others.

The awards event is a production of the D Council, the Adcraft Club of Detroit committee that oversees the awards judging and “creative black-tie” presentation event at the Max M. Fisher Music Center.

About 700 people attended Wednesday.

Winners receive a small metal script letter D and a “bling” D necklace. The full list of winners will be posted in about a week at TheDShow.org.

The awards (other than The Joe) were determined by a panel of judges from advertising and creative agencies outside of Detroit.

The D Awards replaced the Caddy Awards, handed out since 1989 by the now-defunct Detroit Creative Directors Council. The Caddies ended in 2006.

There was a video tribute during the award ceremony for George Katsarelas, an executive creative director at Leo Burnett Detroit who died of a heart attack in June. Katsarelas had been chairman of the panel that oversees the D Awards.

Katsarelas, who had also worked for Doner and Campbell-Ewald, developed the “I'm In” campaign to better declining enrollment in Detroit Public Schools.

Leo Burnett's Jeff Cruz, a close friend of Katsarelas who led Wednesday's tribute and took over the chairmanship in his place, helped finish the campaign's most visible physical element, the 172 blue doors in Hart Plaza that represent each of the district's schools.

A memorial scholarship in his name has been established at Michigan State University's Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing within the College of Communications Arts and Sciences.

Mark Ford, a division president at Time Inc., announced during the ceremony that Campbell-Ewald is the winner of an advertising campaign contest, sponsored by the publishing giant's yearlong Assignment Detroit journalism project. The contest was to produce campaigns aimed at keeping young creative people to live and work in Detroit.

All five entries in the Time contest will run in several of the publisher's magazine and Web sites this month in ad inventory worth $1 million.

Correction: earlier online versions of this story, relying on erroneous information from the D Show, misstated the winner of the Print category. This version contains the corrected information.