Patts Melbourne snares AdNews Agency of the Year; Clemenger BBDO wins Creative Network

B&T chose Three Drunk Monkeys, CB picked Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne, now George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne has been named AdNews Agency of the Year at last night’s awards held at Star City in Sydney.

Clemenger BBDO was awarded the Creative Network of the Year title; Whybin\TBWA\Tequila won the NSW Agency of the Year; George Patterson Y&R won Victorian Agency of the Year; Clemenger Proximity, Melbourne won Direct Agency of the Year; Soap Creative, Sydney won Digital Agency of the Year; BCM Brisbane won the State Agency of the Year; Banjo, Sydney was awarded Emerging Agency of the Year; Mediacom Sydney won Media Agency of the Year; and Mediacom won Media Network of the Year.

Happy Soldiers, Sydney’s innovative Tontine campaign won both the Ad Campaign of the Year and Media Campaign of the Year.

Specialist Agency of the Year went to Downstream Marketing; Promotion Agency of the Year to Momentum Worldwide; Experiential Agency of the Year to Play; and PR Agency of the Year was won by Mango Communications.

Says Y&R Brands CEO Russel Howcroft (pictured above): “F*&&%K! It’s a terrific endorsement of all the hard work the Melbourne team has done over the past couple of years. The staff at GPY&R are committed to their clients, their work and each other. We’ve fought our way back with great thinking; great work and made our clients happy. It’s an awesome effort.”

Which agencies enter which Agency of the Year titles?

CB did this poll prior to the 2010 call for entries

Deservedly, master copywriter and adman John Bevins (pictured left circa 1980) was inducted into the AdNews Hall of Fame.

Bevins was inducted into the CB Hall of Fame in 1996. This from the citation when Bevins was inducted into the AWARD Hall of Fame in 2009:

As chairman and creative director of leading Australian independent agency, John Bevins, which he founded in 1982, Bevins is renowned for, among other things, the long-copy ads he wrote for BT Funds Management and his championing of copywriting. Born in Liverpool, England in 1946 he arrived in Australia in the same year and his first job in advertising was in 1963 as a dispatch boy at Hansen-Rubenson McCann-Erickson. He worked his way to print production, accounts, then copy, working as a junior writer under Bryce Courtenay.

He spent the next decade at Ogilvy & Mather joining as a writer in 1967 in its first year in Australia. In 1972, aged 26, he was made creative director, a job that came with a stint at Ogilvy & Mather New York. Bevins left in 1979 to set up creative consultancy Bevins, Slapp with the late Brian Slapp. One of their first campaigns was the ‘Sponge’ TVC for Quit for Life, a visual metaphor for tobacco being wrung out of a human lung. Other earlier work includes ‘TDK does amazing things to my system’ and ‘Take me away please, P&O’.

In 1993 John was voted Advertising Person of the Year and Creative Person of the Year in the Campaign Brief readers’ poll. In 2002 he was awarded the inaugural Advertising Federation of Australia’s medallion for services to the industry and in 2007 the Denis Everingham Award for copywriting at the Caxtons.

“John is an amazing talent and very shy, unlike some in the business who have elevated their profiles by promoting themselves to lofty positions in inverse proportion to their talent,” said Ray Black, when Bevins was inducted into The Work’s 2008 Hall of Fame. Black became a partner with Bevins in the mid 1980s where they had a great time on working with clients refereed to as OKOP – Our Kind of People. “There is a wonderful freedom in being able to choose the clients we respected and wanted to work with and the work we produced to fit comfortably with a social conscience,” said Black.