Mindshare has taken the crown as 'Agency Network of the Year' at this year's Festival of Media Asia-Pacific Awards, with a total of 12 winning entries across the board. The majority of those campaigns were implemented by Mindshare India, earning the local office the 'Agency of the Year' title. 

'How we used programmatic to develop content and reach millennials to get them fired up for KFC's Hot and Cheezy Burger!' from Universal McCann earned the 'Campaign of the Year' accolade, in addition to Gold for 'Best Use of Video', Silver for 'Best Targeted Campaign' and 'The Smart Use of Data Award'. 

New for 2016, the Festival of Media Asia Pacific Awards partnered with Twitter to introduce a new category: "Twitter Live Marketing" to reflect the increasing importance and speed of marketing communications in our industry. The Gold winner in this category was 'When Google Maps went beyond giving directions to people. It unlocked a treasure. Thanks to Lay's' by Mindshare India, Silver went to 'Pepsi's Pre-emptive strike on social media', also by Mindshare India, and taking Bronze was 'McDonald's Beat the Mayweather' by Leo Burnett Manila.  

Congratulations to all the winners. See below for the full list of Gold, Silver and Bronze winners across all categories and be sure to click through to view the full case studies. 

Digital agency Hungry Boys is behind the launch of a project in the shape of a new record label Sound of Change, which aims to give street buskers the opportunity to have their music recorded in a studio and gain listeners around the world in an effort to help them make money beyond the streets. 

Simply by uploading a video of someone busking to the Sound of Change website, adding details about the musician and geotagging the location, performers can be mapped and shared on social networks using the hashtag #soundofchange.  

Hungry Boys will then look for producers and other partners to help facilitate an opportunity for the musicians to record in a nearby studio. The music will then be released via a variety of download and streaming sites including iTunes, Spotify and Google Play, will all proceeds going back to the musicians. 

Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest Group leads the shortlist for this year's Festival of Media MENA Awards 2016, having been shortlisted 21 times across 13 categories.  

Next in line is MEC and OMD, both of which have been shortlisted 15 times, followed by Mindshare hot on their heels with 14 shortlisted entries.  

More than 40 judges including leading brands, media agencies, specialist companies and media owners evaluated the quality of the campaigns over the last three weeks. The winners will be decided by a final jury with the successful entrants revealed at the awards evening on April 20 at Music Hall, the Palm in Dubai, which closes the day-long Festival of Media MENA conference. 

In addition, shortlisted campaigns for the Twitter Live Marketing Award and Best Use of YouTube Award will be announced on April 13, 2016. For more information about the event, click here. 

Check out the full list of shortlisted entries below. The Cream team will endeavour to update the links below so be sure to check back over the next few weeks to read the full case studies. 

Uncovering what is and isn't working is the bedrock of an effective campaign, but as customers now consume content from multiple sources, accurate measurement is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.

The last-click has been the unchallenged method for measuring how customers enter the sales funnel for a long time. However, last click models don't provide a comprehensive picture because the path to conversion is never linear, it's multi-channel and multi-device.

Consumers navigate many touch points, both online and offline and it is impossible to trace just one definitive trigger point for a sale, which in effect, is what last click does. This complex reality calls for a more sophisticated measurement solution.

Improving attribution is an industry work in progress and there are limitations, primarily because every advertiser is different and has different objectives which cannot be reduced into a "one-size fits all" attribution model.

This means a consistent standard for the actual methodology of attribution is highly unlikely.

What a genius David Bowie was. Not only was he arguably one of the most original and creative songwriters, musicians and performers, it turns out he was an incredible media futurologist.

One of the most fascinating recent TV tributes was his interview with Jeremy Paxman back in 1999. It’s the one where he predicts the internet. Another of his predictions from the same interview, which has yet to be picked up on, relates to the future of online content. Bowie tells Paxman that it won’t be a case of driving the audience to content, but rather creating the content to suit the audience.

Essentially what Bowie means here is personalisation, which is suddenly a hot marketing topic. From a content perspective, he pretty much predicted native, which is supposed to be the placing of journalistically driven – rather than sales led – branded content within editorial to interest and engage readers. Sadly this isn’t the reality of native.

Spa mineral water has unveiled a new digital campaign to introduce the brand’s new visual identity. Created by J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam, the campaign centres on an online film entitled ‘The Rain Project’ with supporting video content and a new website, and is being rolled out in both the Netherlands and Belgium.

There is a lot of talk around the resurgence of virtual reality (VR) as a viable medium for brands, but why now?

There are essentially three things behind the second-coming of VR…

Firstly, the unstoppable rise of the smartphone. In no time at all, smartphones have become the most important piece of technology in our lives. They are central to pretty much everything we do and they represent the perfect entry point for VR. Forecasts predict that the number of smartphone users will jump to 6.1 billion by 2020 (from 2.6 billion in 2014); that’s a massive audience capable of viewing and engaging with VR content.

Secondly, readily available fast Internet – both mobile and hardwired – means the delivery infrastructure is there and that more people have quick and easy access to online content. Furthermore, with companies increasingly competing on price – especially over mobile networks – the cost continues to come down. This is the gateway to the VR world.

Finally, our always-on culture, driven by the above factors, means there is an exponentially growing need for content. Lots of it. And this content – whether it’s bite-sized or long-form – needs to be engaging. With content becoming more visual – Facebook’s success speaks volumes to this – VR offers a way for content creators to take engagement to the next level.

The same idea can be executed amazingly or poorly. It can seem authentic and original, or gauche and cheap. It can touch millions with clarity, or just hundreds with confusion. This excerpt from the book “Real World Ideas” explores some principles which mark out the very best experiential work, which you can look for when judging a creative idea.

Integrate with reality

Experiential is at its most effective when it interweaves with reality – when it solves a real problem, provides a real service, or similarly effects something else in the real world.

Often however, experiential ideas restrict themselves to the four imaginary walls of a site space in much the same way a TV ad restricts itself to the four walls of a screen. They act out an idea superficially rather than really bringing it to bear in a manner that matters.

When looking at an idea, always ask: “Is the concept communicated here really making an impact, or is it superficial and fictional?”

Use Context

Closely related to encroaching on the real world, this principle involves making the best of your experience's environment to amplify your creative. When people build an experience in a vacuum and place it on an allotted site, they ignore the fact that all around them are things that their budget would never be able to simulate – lots of busy people, nature and so on – which would become part of their experience if they acknowledged them.

Take for instance the New Zealand Coastguard, who showed people how tough it was to find those lost at sea not by building a sea substitute, but by actually dropping people in the middle of the sea itself. The ocean became a core part of their creative idea – free of charge.