Doner’s Work for Amazon Kindle Wins Media Plan of the Year Award
By Greg Clausen, July 25th, 2011
Something very cool happened today for Doner. We were awarded one of Adweek’s “Media Plan of the Year” awards for our work on the introduction of the Amazon Kindle.
Doner has won tons of creative awards over the years. It’s nice to now have a “Media Plan of the Year” award to add to the trophy case. The “Media Plan of the Year” award is the most prestigious media award in the U.S. No Gold, Silver, Bronze awards in this competition – only one winner per category. The categories are typically defined by use of a particular medium and/or spending levels. We won in the category “ Best Use of Print $1-$10 Million.”
It’s very rewarding to be recognized for superior work. But it’s just as rewarding to know that this is a great testament to Doner’s full-service, integrated model. All departments in the agency worked closely to make this campaign a reality. It was hard to tell where the media idea stopped and the creative concept began. Those blurry lines are a good thing, because it shows that a really powerful idea can come from anywhere, and a great execution of that idea needs to come from everywhere. With so much focus these days on digital media, it is also rewarding to demonstrate that innovation in a traditional medium, like print, can still be groundbreaking.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the Kindle campaign, here’s some background. When we were tasked to introduce the Kindle e-reader, creating an entirely new product category, we knew that print was a must-have/must-win medium. If we were going to light the fuse on an e-reader revolution, we’d have to enlist heavy consumers of the printed word. So we identified travelers, commuters and news junkies as our best prospects and then identified the best publications to reach them. And we wanted to speak to them in a disruptive way – something as tactically innovative as the Kindle itself. Then the fun began.
So, we pioneered something different. The kind of boundary-blurring integrations that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in broadcast, but something that has been uncommon – if not unprecedented – in the print space. The “Continued on a Kindle” campaign integrates editorial content with our advertising content (and vice versa).
In Forbes – as one example – we bought the page adjacent to a review of the new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. Toward the end of the review, the article stops mid-sentence and the reader is directed to the ad on the opposite page. There the review continues to its conclusion on the screen of the Kindle, accompanied by the message: “Forbes and over 700,000 other books, magazines, and newspapers. Available with free wireless delivery in less than 60 seconds. No monthly bills. No annual contracts”. We did multiple executions with multiple publications; each time tailoring the campaign premise to the specific editorial environments.
Simple. Powerful. And – to quote Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos – “Brilliant”. We couldn’t agree more.
Great work, made possible by an agency with a great, collaborative culture. View two samples of the creative below.
Get more details from the full press release here and see the full story from Adweek here.
