AdHack Oly Award Winners Announced: Crowdsourcing the Best Olympics Brand Advertising of Vancouver 2010 Winter Games

Vancouver, BC - From a field of 800+ nominated ads, Coca-Cola was awarded The Oly Award for Best Brand of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics for its Open Happiness advertising campaign. The submissions were crowdsourced from attendees and fans of the Olympics who photographed examples of Olympic-related advertising and submitted the best examples to AdHack's panel of judges.

With record TV audiences, the widely watched, and attended 2010 Winter Olympics, were a golden marketing opportunity for the official sponsors and those brands wishing to capitalize on the Olympic enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is what spurred Vancouver-based AdHack into sponsoring The Oly Awards. AdHack is a marketplace for advertising creative. The community of 500+ creators work on advertising campaigns commissioned through the AdHack interface. The creators-many of whom are advertising enthusiasts-saw the Olympics as an opportunity to analyze the best of the official and non-official advertising campaigns featured in Vancouver during the Olympics.

AdHack CEO James Sherrett said, "We wanted to award the corporate gold medal for outstanding ad performance and realized that there was no better way than to tap our own group of advertising creators. The interpretations, reactions and views of our peer review system for creating advertising was perfectly suited for a peer review of Olympics-related advertising campaigns."

The Oly Awards submission process was open to AdHack creators and the general public and provided an opportunity for Olympic attendees and fans to discuss the brands, the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns, and the level of creativity (or fatigue) over the course of the 2-week Games.

Sherrett said, "The Oly Awards provide an avenue for both brands and people to continue the advertising conversation. People get a chance to inform the brands about how their advertising was received from an audience perspective, and how their ads were received. Brands wanting to engage with people in a deeper dialogue see increased opportunity to make meaningful connections."

Photographer Kim Werker also received a second Oly Award for Best Ad Photographer.

"I did a little dance!" said Werker when told of her win. "I'm very flattered and excited. Thank you! I took the photo of The Bay before the Olympics started. Little did we all know there would be a line outside that building every day during the Games, with people patiently waiting to buy their official swag."


JUDGES FOR THE OLY AWARDS

Jim Southcott is Chief Strategic Officer at TBWAVancouver and leads the ad strategic planning for leading brands, such as Labatt, Telus, Vancity, Shaw and HSBC.

Mark Busse is Partner / Design Director at Industrial Brand and past president of the BC chapter of the Graphic Designers Association of Canada (GDC).

Stephen Bailey is marketing and sales director at Vancouver-based, world-famous John Fluevog shoes.


ABOUT THE OLY AWARDS

The Oly Awards celebrate the best of brand advertising during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

From February 12 to 28, The Oly Awards collected crowdsourced photo submissions of advertisements associated with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games on the popular photo-sharing website Flickr. More than 85 photographers contributed 800+ photos of Olympic-related advertising campaigns.

Shortly after the closing ceremonies, The Oly Awards judges curated a shortlist of brand finalists on the Olympic Ad Awards contest site:
http://olympicadawards.com

Two prizes of original artwork from Vancouver artist, and AdHack member, Rachael Ashe, were awarded for:

* Oly Award for Best Olympic-related Brand Advertising Campaign to Coca-Cola
http://bit.ly/bFh3tE

* Oly Award for Best Ad Photographer to Kim Werker
http://bit.ly/aS2G5N


BRAND-BY-BRAND SCORECARD

The Oly Award were judged by 3 leaders of the advertising community. To view the full brand-by-brand scorecard with judging criteria, please visit:

http://adhack.com/go/brand-scorecard


THE OLY AWARDS CONTEST PLATFORM: PROVIDED BY STRUTTA

Strutta.com Media Inc. has developed a platform for advertisers, agencies, or web publishers to easily create and manage online contests. Since Strutta launched its contest platform in 2009, the company has hosted and supported campaigns for some of the biggest brands and agencies in the world, as well as enabling hundreds of smaller marketers to run contests of their own. http://www.strutta.com


ABOUT ADHACK

AdHack is the marketplace for crowdsourced, on-demand creative services. AdHack matches buyers of creative to 500+ top creators in 18+ countries. Buyers get fast, fair and pain-free creation of ads: TV, print, web, outdoor, radio and more. AdHack works to activate creativity for global brands like Microsoft and top ad agencies like CP+B and DDB.

For more information contact:

James Sherrett, AdHack founder & CEO
604-788-1502
http://adhack.com