I’ve never placed too much emphasis on awards. I mean, it’s nice to have your work recognized by a jury of your peers, but you’ll never see anyone at the thinkbank bragging about how many awards our work has won or meticulously cleaning and polishing our trophies. That’s because we don’t produce work for awards – we produce work to win for our clients. But sometimes, you can do both, and that feels pretty good, too.

Here’s an example. In 2007, we helped Turkey Hill Dairy unveil a new product called Duetto. Using a special secret recipe, Turkey Hill was able to combine soft serve ice cream and flavored Venice Premium Ice to create a dessert that wouldn’t freeze solid in colder-than-normal grocery store and home freezers. 

We started with consumer taste testing trials and focus groups assembled and moderated by Pavone. What followed included package design, point-of-purchase displays, a television spot, an outdoor advertising campaign, trade- and consumer-focused public relations campaigns, a dedicated microsite, outreach to food bloggers, updates about Duetto on Turkey Hill’s own blog, and an extensive sampling tour throughout the northeastern United States accompanied by a custom-painted Giant Swirly Cow.

In essence, it was a fully integrated campaign designed to promote not only a new product, but an entirely new category of frozen dessert.

Ten months later, the Duetto campaign took home top honors in the annual International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) awards in the category of Best Overall Mixed Media Campaign. Later that night, it also won “Best of the Best” as the number one marketing effort of the entire program.

Great news, right? Of course it was. The client was happy. We were happy. But the best news – the type of news for which we’d trade an armful of awards any day of week – was revealed long before that awards show. Over 2.5 million units of Duetto were sold in its first six months on grocery store shelves, accounting for four percent of all Turkey Hill frozen dessert sales. Even better, Duetto has been a success without cannibalizing sales of Turkey Hill’s top-selling premium ice cream line, whose sales still managed to increase during the same time frame. 

Let’s face it, clients usually don’t give a damn about awards. They only care about those numbers I mentioned in the previous paragraph. That’s okay, because we care more about those numbers too, and besides, if you’re the client, you can’t pay your employees with gold plaques and glass statues. But in this case, it was a win-win because Turkey Hill sold tons of ice cream and they really did care about the award. They even made a cake emblazoned with the signature Duetto swirl to commemorate the occasion (that’s them above). It made me realize that even though you can’t pay your employees with shiny gold plaques, they do give you a good reason to throw a nice little party in the lunchroom … with a little cake and ice cream, of course.