Sri Lanka ups its game in advertising at Spikes Festival
Sri Lanka’s name reverberated at the recent Asian advertising awards, Spikes in Singapore, highlighting the country’s prowess in producing the best creative works from their agencies in Colombo.
Mr. Ranil De Silva.
Bagging the highest number of awards for Sri Lanka at this year’s Spikes Advertising Awards in Singapore in what is considered the Asian region’s top awards, a number of agencies walked away with some of the top awards in creative. “Our agencies won in the past gold awards but this year we had a haul,” Sri Lanka’s representative for Metal Factor Ranil De Silva said in an interview with the Business Times at his residence in Colombo. Metal Factor helps in the selection of Sri Lanka talent for this annual event.
This year at the Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity 2019 Young Spikes Gold winners were two young professionals from Phoenix Ogilvy Group’s Hansaka Wickramasinghe and Dinali Rajapakse who won Gold in the ‘Media’ category.
Maheshi Dunuwilage and Shahan Fernando, from NGage Strategic Alliance won the Bronze Award in the Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity 2019 Young Spikes Competition in the ‘PR’ category.
Sathira Perera of the University of Moratuwa walked away with the Gold for the Student Creative Award for Print for his poster design.
Kokuladason Biruthiviranjan from the University of Moratuwa was chosen from several student portfolios that were reviewed by the festival to attend the Cheil Academy at Spikes Asia 2019.
Anusha Wijeyaratne – Creative Consultant, Phoenix Ogilvy & Mather, was selected to sit on the Outdoor and Radio and Audio Jury at Spikes Asia 2019. She was also invited to serve on the Glass: The Award for Change Jury.
TBWA won Gold, two Silvers and two Bronze for their campaign for ‘Aura Aliya’; and TRIAD won Silver and Bronze for its Life Chant campaign, launched in partnership with the Public Health Department of the Colombo Municipal Council.
Mr. De Silva noted that every year the industry would send about 20 persons to the awards at Cannes in France and Spikes in Singapore and this is considered as an important event by the industry as well.
At the locally held competition from about 100 entries selections are made to find who would represent Sri Lanka at the Spikes Festival.
“Sri Lanka was a very prominent nation in bagging all these awards,” he said adding that this was what he had expected to achieve when he started out to creating opportunities for the youth in the advertising industry to fine tune them and showcase their talent.
“I got opportunities back then and so now I want to create opportunities for the youth in Sri Lanka to see what’s out there,” Mr. De Silva said.
Metal Factor started out to achieve this goal and it had taken about 10 years since then to get Sri Lanka to be the most talked about country that was always called up to receive the awards this year.
“When I went to Ad Fest I felt ashamed of what we were achieving at SLIM (Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing) awards because internationally we were not competitive,” he explained.
It was here that Mr. De Silva realised that Sri Lanka needed to spruce up its standards to be recognised on the global arena.
In this respect, they would be sending about 30 persons from the industry to the annual festivals and other training programmes; subsequently the rest of the industry also followed suit, he said.
Mr. De Silva works with the 4As and IAA to run the programme and send people out to Cannes and Spikes.
All these awards and the recognition Sri Lanka has achieved has created the fundamental requirement that the standard of advertising will improve in the country, he noted.
This would mean there would be good advertising and good communication that would ensure they obtain the essential skills for marketing, Mr. De Silva said.
Bagging the awards also has had benefits on the home front where some clients would opt to select agencies that had won awards.
The industry would next be vying to achieve Gold in the main category at the Cannes for Sri Lanka although previously the country had obtained the Young Marketer Gold Award at the event.