Comment

It has been a good couple of weeks for the UK digital industry, what with the storming success of UK agencies at last week's 55th Cannes International Advertising Festival and tonight's celebration of the real results that digital media can achieve at the NMA Effectiveness Awards 2008.

It's a relief that our Cannes report this year (News Analysis, page 12) is able to celebrate the UK's awards haul, following the poor showing last year that led to debate in these pages over the state of...

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... digital creativity in the UK. Because, of course, awards do matter. As Mark Cridge points out in his column opposite, they set the standard for the industry to follow.

As the hangovers finally clear from last night's NMA Effectiveness Awards, many will be looking to emulate the success of the winners across all categories, especially the Grand Prix. The Effectiveness Awards are always challenging to judge because creativity and innovation must, in the final analysis, be judged on the business benefit they delivered.

The Grand Prix winner delivered on all these fronts. Online has been under fire this year for its ability to let brands sidestep the rules governing advertising snack foods to kids. So it was great to see the British Heart Foundation using online to educate children about the contents of junk food and how it's marketed. This was a fully integrated campaign that used compelling creative with clever media planning to engage a difficult-to-reach audience with a message they probably wouldn't have been fully open to receiving. So the 18m interactions and 30% interaction rate were truly impressive.

Key to the success of this campaign was the BHF's decision to avoid the box-ticking approach to online marketing that so many big brands take to reach children, grabbing at Second Life and YouTube straws. As Cannes Cyber Lions awards jury president Colleen DeCourcy says in our report, one of the reasons for the success of UK digital agencies is that technology takes a back seat to ideas - something the BHF and all our awards winners demonstrated superbly.

Justin Pearse, editor, NMA justin.pearse@centaur.co.uk