Trillion Dollar winner

Johannesburg - South Africa's winningest advertising conception, TBWA Hunt Lascaris' Trillion Dollar Campaign, has climaxed its season of success by taking the world's most prestigious advertising design award, the D&AD Black Pencil. This is a first for South Africa.

It is almost certainly the world's most-awarded campaign of the past year, having racked up (by our count) 63 awards since it took the Cannes Lions Festival by storm last June, winning a Grand Prix and five Gold Lions.

The campaign rests on a single, simple idea: that the Robert Mugabe regime has destroyed Zimbabwe's currency to the point where it's cheaper to plaster a billboard with Zim dollar notes than with paper.

The billboard was the central feature of a campaign to support the exile newspaper, The Zimbabwean, in its fight for press freedom. Printed over the currency were slogans like "Thanks to Mugabe this money is wallpaper".

Design & Art Direction is a British educational charity devoted to promoting excellence in design and advertising. The South African Creative Circle rates its awards the hardest international award to win.

D&AD president Paul Brazier said it was "no mean feat to turn a symbol of oppression into a campaign for freedom of speech. The agency used the worthless currency to send a clear message about the newspaper's objectives. It's so simple, but it feels really fresh."

Hunt Lascaris executive creative director Damon Stapleton said it was "a parable about protecting small ideas and letting them grow and become great. An idea can come from anywhere. This campaign started as an idea on a creative's wall. It happened only because there were enough people who fought for it and saw it through to the end."

In the last three weeks the campaign has also won a Black Cube (best of show) at The Art Directors' Club of New York, top awards at the Clio and The One Club competitions in the US, and a Gold Apex, the South African event for advertising effectiveness. To illustrate its effectiveness, in its first weekend the website logged two million hits, and over 200 000 people visited The Zimbabwean's Flickr page.

In the campaign's first month, the website saw a 91% increase in visitors. And the newspaper enjoyed a 45% increase in revenue resulting in "the survival of the only independent Zimbabwean newspaper left", says Stapleton.

The campaign has restored Hunt Lascaris to top of the creative league table, after a slump in the 2006 to 2008 period during which it fell to a low of 11th.

- Fin24.com