Latest Aerial Award winner announced

Sam Walker, ECD at Uncommon Creative Studio, chooses Marmite’s ‘Mind Control’ with Seat by Adam & Eve/DDB as this month’s winner of the Aerial Awards, a monthly celebration of the best of British radio advertising and the people who make it happen.

A big congratulations to Simon Vicars, Andre Sallowicz, Matt Fitch and Mark Lewis from Adam & Eve DDB who are the creatives behind the ad. Here’s what Sam had to say: 

“It sounds like a regular Seat ad but then Marmite messages keep punctuating to ‘subliminally’ convince you to love Marmite.

This has good comedy timing, a strong idea and great attention to craft.

It’s quite unusual for an ad to genuinely break the conventions of radio advertising but this does that well and is all the more successful for it.

It arguably works better on radio than it does in the TV version. And props to the team who’ve clearly engaged other brands and asked them if they can cross-pollinate, rather than interrupt ‘fake ads’ (which 99% of other agencies and clients would have done). It shows what can be done with a bold idea and a strong team.

Planning and accounts will have had some work to do to convince the other clients to let their ads be trodden on, but in the end they all win from doing things a little differently.”

Our Head of Creative Develoment Clare Milner had this to add:

“‘Indifferent to Marmite’ is my disingenuous Twitter bio. The reality is that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool lover. And not just of the glorious thing that is Marmite on toast, but also of the brand that consistently invests in distinctive, memorable advertising, not least in radio.

I suspect it also makes a lot of people pay more attention to the SEAT commercial that it hijacks, which is no bad thing. Radio is a highly creative medium, ripe for subversion. This campaign demonstrates this perfectly.”

Listen to the award winning work below: 

We also asked Sam to tell us his favourite radio ad of all time is, he told us this would have to be the Christmas ad for Australian drinks brand Carlton Dry “The Most Wonderful Time for a Beer” hear it below:

If you’ve worked on a great radio ad, enter free here for your chance to win, and read Sam Walker’s tips on advertising on radio here.