India climbs to 15th in world ad ranking

MUMBAI: Indian advertising has just scaled a new high. India has moved up six notches from 21 to 15 in the list countries with the highest advertising awards, according to the Gunn Report of 2007.

India has moved ahead of China, New Zealand, Mexico and South Africa, among others, to notch up a total of 39 points for award winning campaigns in Print, TV and Interactive. In addition to this, HappyDent Palace, one of the most awarded commercials from this year, made it to the top 10 most awarded commercials in 2007.

The Gunn Report is an annual rating of creative work based on the awards won by advertising agencies in nearly 60 different award shows. Donald Gunn, the author of the Gunn Report, had been with Leo Burnett for over 35 years. The country with the most awarded advertisements is the US, which nudged ahead of the UK in 2007.

Besides HappyDent, only one other Indian ad made it to the most awarded list. Ogilvy & Mather’s ad for Indian Association for Adoption, which was the 12th most awarded print campaign of 2007. The most awarded TV ad was Sony Bravia’s Paint ad, created by Fallon, while the print honours went to Clima Bicycle Locks, created by Leo Burnett Bangkok.

As a result of creating two highly awarded ads, both McCann Erickson and O&M have made it to the list of most awarded agencies globally. McCann stood joint 22nd while O&M stood joint 45th.

Says McCann Erickson India chairman and NCD Prasoon Joshi: “We were certainly expecting to score high because we’ve performed very well and got global accolades. But we didn’t expect to see HappyDent in the top 10.” Mr Joshi felt that the work from Indian agencies was improving but everyone would have to do consistently good work to be able to move into the top 10 next year.

Also making an entry into the list was Equinox Films, headed by Ram Madhvani. Equinox was joint 17th with a total of nine points for the most awarded production houses. Ram Madhvani retains his 11th place as the most awarded director.

This year, the Gunn Report has also included interactive as a category to evaluate creative performance for agencies, and a few Asian countries haven’t had enough to show in this category. Had India been evaluated on Print and TV scores alone it would have been ranked 13th.

The most awarded agency for 2007 went to TBWA/Chiat/Day (New York) which was ranked a lowly 43 last year while BBDO retained the most awarded agency network for 2007, making it five wins out of nine Gunn Reports.