How did we get into finals of Sabre awards?

The idea of creating an electronic Happy New Year card came to us back in September 2012, when we were brainstorming the possible gifts for our business partners, clients and friends. In the time period between September and December last year, during which the Card went live, its contents were in a crystal clear way portraying everything we worked on in the past year. At that time we couldn’t even imagine this project would get us to the finals of prestigious European SABRE awards. Here is how our project “traveled” to Barcelona 2013.

Why did we choose to do a greeting card?

In the past years, we were always trying hard to create unique, personalized gifts for everyone we worked with. We would pay attention to the packaging and usefulness of that gift. In the end we would hire a courier to deliver these gifts in person. Unfortunately, we rarely got any feedback.

When you do something and do not cause the wanted reaction, you start looking for reasons for that, usually labeling the lack of free time of other parties as the reason for poor feedback. It’s the end of the year and everyone is finalizing their reports and creating plans for the next year. However, when same thing happens two years in a row, you start wandering. The finances of this particular project fall under totally different story. This is why we had to come up with something different this time around, something that would motivate people to see, respond, comment, like. The money that we previously invested into purchasing gifts, we gave into charity this time. So our shift was not a financial one, because the money that we have invested during the previous years into gifts was invested this year as well, but much less money was spent for the "present", and the rest was given to the charity.

The Card was in making for more than three months – from the idea to its realization. We developed a concept, collected all the necessary materials, worked on a unique stop motion technique, and picked the background music. Every team member in Chapter 4 contributed to the project. After sending it to 600 emails, in the first 24 hours we had more than 100 positive comments, shares and likes, as well as significant number of responds via emails and calls… soon after, the number of positive responses multiplied.

Barcelona, ThinkThank Conference and the gala dinner

Since we were happy with the reactions to our Card, which cannot be compared to the reactions to the material gifts from the previous years in terms of scale and number of responses, we came up with the idea to candidate our project for some of the prestigious European PR awards. For years now, we’ve been following Holmes report and SABRE. We knew that there were three categories where our Card simply belonged. SABRE awards are awarded in categories for campaigns and in categories in which projects get awarded based on the geographical region they belong to. We nominated out project in three categories: Best viral video, Best PR agency and the best campaign in Balkans. In the first two categories we won Certificates of Excellence. In the third category we were selected as finalists for the Golden SABRE for Balkans.

From the moment we nominated out Card, through the jurying period and announcement of the finalists, where we made the finals in all three categories (April 2013), the overall visibility of our Card increased significantly. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVT2aMMqLeE)

Then the dilemmas started. Due to the amount of work we had in the agency, we were not sure that we could make it to the awards ceremony which would require several days off. The trip itself would be very tiring. On the other hand, this was a perfect opportunity to attend a conference where the best among the equally good presenters would present their case studies. In the end we decided to go.

It was extremely tiring, but worth it. Before going to the conference, we had an opportunity to see Gaudi’s Barcelona and some other things.

In a fantastic Ritz Carlton Art hotel, after the registration and lunch, the ThinkThank 2013 conference begun. After the introductory speech held by The Holmes Report’s founder Paul Holmes, the ceremony of the SABRE silver awards began.

The program carried on with the topic “What makes a winner?” where the three awarded companies held their presentations:

• Halo for Halo 4, impressive experimental Microsoft XBOX campaign which brought journalists and bloggers “into” the game.

• After Microsoft, the Swedish company Blocket presented the way they created the game called “Easter eggs” which helped them reach the game developers they employed afterwards.

• The third was Oglivy-s hijack of Red Bull’s Stratos in the campaign called “Stratos Jump Successful” which featured Lego toys as lead characters.

These presentations were followed by a great lecture about how to enable storytelling methodology to become a part of the business culture in a company. The representatives from Microsoft with their PR agency from the UK talked about this interesting topic.

The last panel on the conference talked about characteristics of successful multimedia storytelling, and the participants in the panel were companies Gallina Blanca Star, TV kanala History i FYM Italcementi.

In the end, the director of strategy and corporate communications of the European Commission, Sixtine Bouygues, gave a lecture on the complexity of creating content and messaging that the European Commission communicates in the EU, the multinational community, with various languages using a variety of communication channels tailored to the specifics of each nation, their culture and tradition.

After the two hours stop, the gala dinner begun with the Golden SABRE winners anouncement. It was a great experience to be among the 500 (or more) clolegues and professionals from the leading European PR firms. The stars of this year’s SABRE awards were celegues from Slovakia, Norway and others. The interesting thing is that these agencies are not part of any major PR networks. The huge success for our Card is the fact that, among the two thousand projects, it reached three finals. This is not just our sucess, but sucess of the whole serbian PR machine, because, along with Chapter4 Serbia, the Blumen agency was also among the finalists for Balkan area.

We came back from Barcelona full of positive impressions, with three Certificates of Excellence, and the confirmation that our work is competitive in the European market, as well as the fact that creativity, innovation and good ideas in work have no boundaries.