Judging the ADDYs. A report from Pittsburgh.

This past weekend I had the honor and the pleasure of judging the Pittsburgh Addys. Besides the fact that my car broke down on the drive there, it was a truly delightful experience. The folks who run the Pittsburgh Ad Fed are some of the nicest people I’ve met in the business. And their organization is top-notch through and through.

Generally speaking, I like judging the Addys. It gives me a good sense of what is going on the advertising world as a whole. It allows me to see beyond my own agency and clients to get a true sense of our business. It’s really reinvigorating for a creative guy, like me.

Without giving away the winners, here are a few observations I came away with after a weekend immersed in creativity.

1.    If print is dead, someone needs to tell the folks in Pittsburgh. I was very surprised at the number of print entries at the show. I would say well over half of the submissions were still on old fashioned paper. And there was a lot of very good—even exceptional — print being done.

2.    Social media hasn’t been fully embraced by the creative community yet. This year, I was expecting to see a tidal wave of entries that had a social media component.  There weren’t many at all. Which was surprising considering the seismic shift our industry is experiencing in this area.

3.   “You can’t get creative in this category” is not an acceptable excuse for lame work. Pittsburghers proved it. Some truly outstanding work was done in categories that historically haven’t had a good track record for breakthrough messaging.

4.   If you look hard enough, some advertisers actually have money. In this, the Great Recession, I was expecting to see a tremendous dearth of high-budget production. Yet, there were numerous television campaigns, corporate videos and print submissions that clearly had the bucks to do it right. I found that particularly encouraging.

Again, my thanks to the Pittsburgh Ad Fed for inviting me. It was a lot of fun.