The AME Grand Jury members are Strategic, Innovative, Analytical Critical Thinkers, Creative Storytellers who are dedicated to ensuring brand awarness and equity. Their global reputations as both industry leaders and award-winning marketers guarantee that all entries submitted into the AME Awards are evaluated with the utmost of care and consideration. As experts in creative effectiveness their ability to recognize ground-breaking results-driven work truly sets the bar for the 2022 competition.

2022 AME Grand Jury member Miriam Wells is Head of Strategy & Creative at Ogilvy PR Australia brings 15 years’ experience in using creativity to make stories matter for brands, businesses and even governments to the jury panel. Her work includes helping not-for-profits smash fundraising goals, building thought leadership platforms for support tech companies as they enter new markets and creating behaviour and culture change programs for federal government departments and pharmaceutical companies designed to re-orient operations around user/patient problems, and the support they need.

In the interview below, Miriam shares her perspective on new innovations engaging consumers, her favorite most successful ad, how brand positioning has evolved and much more.

AME Awards: What stand-out attributes do you recognize in award-winning creative effective advertising?

Miriam Wells: Deep human insights that are relevant with consumers, not as ‘audience segments’ but as living, breathing people. Creativity  

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

Miriam Wells: The focus on effectiveness is critical – it’s the why behind every campaign and activity, the reason for being for our industry; focusing on creativity or craft without effectiveness factored in is a ‘what’ in search of a ‘why’. In any creative ideation process teams could be churning out creative brilliance in spades, with lots of moving, fun, interesting creative territories and tactics on the table. But the challenge is aligning them to the desired outcome that will work for both client and audience – that’s the filter we need to push creativity through. It’s a question of solving the right problem – the blend of creativity, strategy and outcomes focused is what separates advertising, marketing and communications from entertainment or art (though occasionally the lines blur – sometimes to great effect, other times not so much).

You can have the most amazingly creative, fully featured car in the world, but if the brief is ‘get someone from Sydney to Paris’, then that fabulous car is not going to cut it. So the emphasis on effectiveness is critical, and competitions like the AME Awards help reinforce that criticality, and highlight that effectiveness doesn’t mean a compromise on creativity.

AME Awards: Speak to the evolution of brand positioning, values, and tone of voice during the past few years.

Miriam Wells: As the media and communications landscape has become more and more fragmented, brands are showing up in new channels in new and increasingly unexpected ways. With this fragmentation of landscape, comes a fragmentation of audiences and their attention. This has forced  brands to adapt to this non-linear, dispersed environment without losing the sense of themselves as a brand – consistency. This is where brand behavior – that blend of positioning, character / personality, values and tone of voice – really comes to the fore. How can brands – in ever more diverse channels and touchpoints – create a sense of consistency, that deepens their relationship to audiences and fans, without seeming same-same. Brands need to strike the right balance of consistency and freshness, to build equity but avoid fatigue. Balenciaga in the metaverse and on the Simpsons springs to mind. These moments are freshness on a continuum of playing at the fringes of pop culture, a continuum that you could trace back through their infamous Ikea Frakta homage.

Another example of a brand getting this right is Wendy’s – their ‘fresh not frozen’ catch cry found unexpected expression in the Keeping Fortnite Fresh campaign, which evolved into a character play deep into the gaming space, where they’ve become less of a brand on Twitch, and more of a player; it’s brand being and doing, rather than saying, it’s been delightful to watch this personality unfold.

AME Awards: What innovations are changing the way agencies engage consumers on behalf of brands?

Miriam Wells: It’s an obvious one but the metaverse and blockchain have opened up new channels and modes of engagement for brands, and of course every agency is pitching their clients an NFT idea right now! We’ve seen some interesting early adopter experiments from the like Balenciaga x Fortnite collab, and the Australian Open NFT balls. But as the novelty polish wears off the newness of these modes of engagement, creativity and utility will determine what is effective in these spaces into the future.

AME Awards: What is your favorite most successful ad and why? What campaign resulted in a global brand making an impressive pivot?

Miriam Wells: One that springs to mind is probably less of an ad and more of a platform – the stage for a series of successively amazing campaigns that have shifted attitudes and driven outcomes. And not just for brands, but for categories and even communities. One that comes to mind is Bodyform/Essity/Libresse’s work in destigmatizing periods and the experiences of people with vaginas. Their recent work in Womb Stories heroes the diversity of those stories from the pain of endometriosis to the joy of childbirth and the grief of pregnancy loss. This is just the latest in an extraordinary multiyear platform from the brand, which has shifted attitudes, representation and nudged behavior with work like Blood Normal and Viva la Vulva (perhaps my fave and an outstanding demonstration of craft!)

The work is rooted in deep human insight as well as product and brand relevance, and expressed through great integrated creativity. They’ve built character with each successive campaign play and it’s category-defining work that’s seen competitors scramble to catch up to the new agenda they’ve set. This isn’t only great work that delivers commercial results, it’s also effective at shifting perceptions and behavior – an example of which is a Russian workshop with hundreds of doctors around the campaign’s ‘visual pain dictionary’, an unusual second life for a campaign asset.