AOY 2.0: Publicis JimenezBasic Agency of the Year once again after 10 years

On the 20th year of the Agency of the the Year (AOY) Awards of the Association of Accredited Advertising Agencies Philippines (4As), Publicis JimenezBasic won its second Agency of the Year award, the first in 2007 (as Jimenez Basic) being ten years ago—a win that was synchronous to the 2017 award’s monicker AOY 2.0. Publicis JimenezBasic also won Best in Market Performance.

Bebot Ngo, CEO at Publicis JimenezBasic Advertising since 2008, enthused, “Very happy for the results from this evening. The last time the agency won Agency of the Year was in 2007, I was just told. I was reminded by Vanne [Tomada] that the last time we won was ten years ago, so finally, as PJB, we won it again. We came in tonight with very strong market performance cases and we’re happy to have been recognized for them. Very strong performances of very strong brands already, so it’s very tough to beat such records. We’re quite happy with that, that we finally got that award for that kind of work. We also had very high hopes for winning Management of Business, because it is still very difficult to drive growth for an already very big business and very big size of relationship.”

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“We’re quite happy that the past year we were able to do that very successfully as well. Also, very important is the work that we put out there, which is creative work. That has always been the struggle for agencies like PJB. We had really wanted to make sure that this time around, with the new PJB, we show everyone that we can do very good creative work. I think those three very strong cases provided us the right pieces to actually win the big prize,” she added.

For their part, Seven A.D. won of the Independent Agency of the Year Award—the agency’s third no less. With four wins, TBWA\Santiago Mangada Puno garnered the most number of awards for the night: for Activation Creativity and Effectiveness, Activation Execution Excellence, Digital Creativity and Effectiveness, and Best in Creative. MediaCom won three awards: Digital Excellence Awards for Media, Media Excellence in Management of Business, and the Overall Media Excellence Award. Hit Productions collected its 16th AOY Award with its win for Production Excellence for Audio.

The AOY 2017 awards night was held on July 7 at the Rizal Ballroom of the Makati Shangri-La Hotel was attended by a stellar cast of award winning young creatives, agency leaders, 4As heads, and AOY jurors.

AOY Chair and Managing Director at J. Walter Thompson Philippines Golda Roldan exclaimed, “We always say that 4A’s Agency of the Year Awards is the award that really matters. This is really where the culmination of everything that the agency does, from industry participation, from market performances, to creative product, and, of course, the management of our businesses.”

Roldan explained, “There are four main categories. There is Best in Industry Leadership & Community Service, there is Best in Market Performance, Best in Creative, and Best in Management of Business. Those are the main categories, but there are other categories like Digital Excellence, there’s Media Excellence, and there’s Activation Excellence. So the judging process is there’s a panel of judges, and, of course, all the works of different agencies are presented to the judges and they score on their own. There’s no deliberation, each of the judges just judges on their own.”

AOY 2.0, while still retaining the stringent selection process by jurors from previous years, added a new award and a new criteria for the overall Agency of the Year Award—Digital Excellence.

Roldan noted, “Maybe one thing that I can say that has not changed, AOY is like the Oscars: you only know the finalists—it’s even actually better than the Oscars, right? The Oscars, you actually know the nominees months before. For AOY, you only know the finalist on the night itself and, of course, the winner. That is the integrity of AOY. No one knows that except the auditors. What’s changed, I think I’m happy to say, with an ever-changing world right now in digital, right now what we have done is we have made digital excellence to be a key criteria in the Agency of the Year Award. It’s now part of the key criteria: you have to have an entry in Digital Excellence to vie as a finalist in the Agency of the Year.”

List of Winners:

Activation Excellence Awards