Campfire Takes Home 4 Mixx Awards

With Ad Week at full-tilt right now, NYC is abuzz with people meeting, people greeting, and people bagging 4 Mixx awards. Aw snap!

The Mixx Awards is a highly acclaimed interactive award competition presented by the IAB and judged by brand marketers, media executives and agency experts from across the country. Some of Campfire’s best and brightest (and currently, most hungover) were there last night to accept awards for our True Blood: Revelation campaign in the following categories:

Gold: New Product Launch

Gold: Digital Integration

Silver: Social Marketing

Bronze: Interactive Video

Not only are we extremely proud of being honored at such a prestigious event, we’re pleased to say we received an award in every category in which we were entered! Better yet, those awards are like, really heavy. We kind of like to think of their weight as being in direct proportion to the amount of work we put into making the campaign really special…because, seriously, if I had to break a window or something (in order to rescue a helpless kitten from a burning pet store, duh), I’d take the Mixx Award over a brick any day.

A lot of love goes out to Deep Focus and …and company too. They helped us out tremendously with the campaign and we’re pumped they were there to share the honor with us as well.

Head over here to take a peek at all the other Mixx Award Winners. Look below to see He-man C.C. hefting one of those beasts with only one hand! Don’t challenge this guy to an arm wrestling competition if you know what’s good for you.

Finally, our managing partner Steve Wax was asked by the conference to create a presentation on “What Advertising’s Creative Revolution Means to Me”…or  ”him”…I hate it when that happens.

Anyway, Steve talked about the importance of finding an audience, entertaining them, measuring them, and fostering debate between them – all done with a brand at  the center. According to Steve, “The audience is now our creative partner” and “We have to recognize [they are] up on stage with us.”

Furthermore, Steve based his entire presentation around a metaphor relating to public nudity, so there. Take a gander at Mr. Wax telling-it-like-it-is below (alas, birthdaysuitless)

True Blood: Revelation

On September 7, 2008, HBO premiered True Blood, a new series about vampires from creator Alan Ball (Six Feet Under). In the show, a synthetic blood beverage called “Tru Blood” allows vampires to walk among humans. HBO faced some specific communications challenges marketing True Blood. Primary among them was creating awareness, building buzz and ultimately driving tune-in.

Also, since the vampire genre skews quite young, they needed to identify and attract a new, harder-to-reach demo. We responded to the challenges by launching an integrated event-level marketing campaign designed to explain the back story behind how vampires discover, market, and ultimately use “Tru Blood” to integrate with society. By leveraging all available promotional platforms to generate wide-scale awareness and broaden the audience of a “genre” show, we enabled a deeper engagement with the show from the outset and built an early and loyal audience.

For more information contact Simone Oppenheimer at soppenheimer@campfirenyc.com or 646 837 0340.