The AME Awards, honoring the world’s best advertising & marketing effectiveness, recruits its powerhouse jury from around the globe. The AME Awards honors not just campaigns that are creative, but campaigns that hit the bullseye for brands. Winners in AME triumph in both creativity and effectiveness.  AME's Grand Jury represents some of the world’s most creative and strategic minds in advertising and marketing communications and they are the genius minds associated with many of AME’s award-winning entries.

2020 AME Grand Jury member, Daniel da Hora, Chief Creative Officer for DH,LO Creative Boutique Brazil is considered one of the most important Northeast Brazilian creatives of his generation. With more than 20 years in the industry, he helped build successful regional and national cases for brands such as Apple, Carrier, Castrol, Honda, GM, and many others.

AME Awards: Tell us about your process of creating and delivering effective results.

Daniel da Hora: I am really focused on craft. That is the key of our work. And, once you look at every detail as a component to achieve excellence in creativity, your work can have more of a chance to be effective and to make the difference for the clients.

AME Awards: As a strategic creative, what do ads that have taken the brief and turned it into campaign that transforms opinions, evokes action and raises the bar for the brand have in common?

Daniel da Hora: They all, in different levels, and by different paths, seek excellence and tell stories and touch people in a relevant way. Forget about old tricks and perfumery. We all know now (and the audience knows it too) that relevance and telling a good story is the key to engagement and to stay on people’s mind.

AME Awards: Why are effectiveness competitions like the AME Awards important?

Daniel da Hora: Effectiveness means all the efforts of both client and agency were recognized by the most important instance of the market chain: the client, the audience. In the end, it’s all about that: being relevant to the audience and make them act towards the brand, its products and services. Creativity must seek effective results for making sense in Advertising.

AME Awards: What makes you share your time and energy to participate on the AME Grand Jury and what do you hope to learn?

Daniel da Hora: Being on a creativity jury is always a learning experience. And when the awards stimulate other points of valuing creativity - like AME does focusing on effectiveness - that is beyond valuable for any professional of the industry. Being part of this is like having an MBA in a week.

AME Awards: What is your all time, favorite most effective ad and why does it hit the bullseye for the brand.

Daniel da Hora: Oh, I really like that Heineken campaign “Legendary Journey”, because of the size of the challenge and the result it had: to create a global platform and drive results everywhere it ran. Also, there’s this Walkers “Sandwich” activation, when Pepsi used a pool of multi-channel techniques along with opinion makers and celebrities to gain awareness for a snack not so popular.

AME Awards: AME’s Grand Jury provides the opportunity to earn trophies within a region and on a global stage, what are the advantages for the opportunity to earn both a regional and an international award within the same competition?

Daniel da Hora: It’s really good to see how local executions handle smaller budgets but with the same passion and even with an excellent craft, compared to global brands and multinational campaigns. Juries that provide this opportunity of joining both worlds (local and global) help us understand that, in the end, the important things are creativity, craft, relevance, and it the scale doesn't matter. 

AME Awards: Who is your inspiration and how has this philosophy made you who you are today?

Daniel da Hora: In a creative matter, I’m so lucky of having my grandfather, Abelardo da Hora, as one of the most important Brazilian artists ever. He passed by 2014, but his legacy and his lessons about hard working, about commitment, about pushing the boundaries, and about always seek for creativity, are a mantra and something I will always have with me.