Seen and noted

BEST TV
If I had a dollar for every time I said, "we had that idea for another client, but couldn't sell it" I'd have AUS$79,359. And that's a fact. Ask anyone here.

Winner: Honda, "Wild Horses" noses it past the post with this surreal twist on "my pseudo SUV can go anywhere strat" by swerving off into a child's twisted imagination. As the proud father of a three year old who's already perfected the art of decapitating dolls, this one got my attention.
Runner Up: Lucozade "performance art". A bit long, but maybe that's the point. Having dozed through my fair share of experimental theatre, this one also touched a nerve.

BEST PRINT
Maybe I've judged too much print over the years. Maybe I'm just jaded. But none of this stuff really did anything for me. I could have been hovering over a table at the One Show a decade ago. Ultimately, it just came down to a subjective exercise in graphic design. Apologies, but that's my POV. As least I'm not slagging you off anonymously.

Winnerish: Dominoes "Way"
Runner Up: Karen Lock Eyeglasses "Ball Point"

BEST OUTDOOR
Call me pernickety (I've been called a lot worse in the last month) but there's a pretty eclectic bunch of media options in this week's batch under "outdoor". Still, "it takes all sorts" as they say, so onwards...

Winner: Since I progressed from sniffing magic markers at art college, I suspect I've worked on just about every client category imaginable, but "The Korean Ministry of Unification" has so far eluded my dark arts. Perhaps, wisely. This "Piano of Unification" project is, at first pass, pretty nuts. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of a grand piano strung with barbed wire from the border, creating music to commemorate past unpleasantries. I know, I can hear you say "not another barbed wire/Korean piano/mash-up idea" but I'd like to hear it play. I think the music could be haunting, and somewhat in-tune with the sensitivity of the painful memory it's created to evoke.
Runner up: Just when you thought you'd seen every twist on the "Coke vending machine secretly filmed in a metro gag"... but, again, hang on. If the core idea is rewarding the simple altruistic trait of sharing, then it's hard to not kinda respect the simple idea of spitting out two bottles and letting nature take its course. Not great, I warrant, but good enough for a mention.

BEST INTERACTIVE
It's hard judging interactive. I did it once in Buenos Aries during a power outage across the city. We were in the basement of a hotel. There was no internet for three hours, but a lot of wine. A lot of wine. Nike+ won, due in part to Bob Greenberg explaining the idea to us, in person, using hand puppets.

Winner: MTV "White Squad". It would be funny if it wasn't so sadly true. Come to think of it, it wouldn't. The infomercial-esque approach is hardly new, but the ugly subject is deftly nailed. And to an audience that really needs to hear it.
Runner up: Sportwear "six pad". OK, it's faintly ridiculous, but if this thing can make me look Rinaldo without moving from the couch, I'm in. Send me one immediately. (For free, obviously.)




This week's guest judge is David 'Nobby' Nobay, creative chairman and founding partner of Droga5, Sydney.

Nobby's 26-year "accidental" career in advertising has put him in the Creative Director's hotseat in Hong Kong, London, New York, San Francisco, Melbourne and, for the last decade, Sydney.

Nobby's creative contributions to the industry have been well documented:

In 2001, Archive magazine ranked him amongst its top ten most published copywriters of the millennium. Campaign Brief magazine ranked him the "No.1 most awarded Creative Director in Australasia" while Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney, under his watch, was crowned Campaign Brief Agency of the Year three years in a row and CB Australian Agency of the Decade. In 2010, AdAge named Nobby the only Australian-based inclusion in its "Top 50 Creative Thinkers Worldwide".

In 2007 he was asked by David Droga to launch his first office outside New York. Droga5 Sydney officially opened its doors in 2008 and was named "Agency of the Year" by B&T magazine in 2009. Since then, the agency has grown to become one of the country's most influential creative voices; helping to steer the brands of many of Australia's most important companies.

Outside his day (and, too often, night) job as Creative Chairman, Nobby managed to fit in the launch of his first theatrical play Moving Parts in 2013, staged at Sydney's prestigious NIDA theatre.

Nobby lives with his wife Nikoll in Sydney and is regularly seen failing to wrangle his three children; ranging in ages from 2 to 21 years.