Express team wins top award for ad

SCOTT HAMMOND/The Marlborough Express

HIGHLIGHTS: Vanessa Watson, left, and Alva O'Rourke celebrate The Marlborough Express advertising team's Australasian print advertising award.

The Marlborough Express advertising team has won an award at the Australasian newspaper advertising awards for an inventive take on promoting road safety.

The Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association (Panpa) advertising awards recognise excellence in advertising design.

The award was for the best print campaign in a publication with a circulation between 10,000 and 25,000.

Vanessa Watson, the advertising manager for The Marlborough Express, said Marlborough Roads wanted a localised road safety campaign and graphic designer Nicky Meadowcroft used an idea she had been "mulling over"for the award-winning advertisement.

Mrs Meadowcroft said she had been looking for ways to use the newspaper to "enhance" the road safety advert, making it more interactive.

The advert consisted of two full pages on consecutive right hand pages in The Saturday Express run as part of a wider road safety campaign in the leadup to, and just after, Easter.

The first page asked the reader to print their name if they wanted to go from 0-150kmh in five seconds; then when the page was turned their name would appear on a cross on the following page.

"It was about really trying to provoke that eerily personal feeling of having your own name on one of those crosses to overcome that feeling of `it'll never happen to me'," Mrs Watson said.

The Panpa Awards had a record 225 entries this year, and it was "great" that the Express team had followed on from its past successes, Mrs Watson said.

"The Marlborough Express has consistently won awards in different categories at Panpa over the last decade."

Mrs Meadowcroft was a "seasoned" ad designer and has won many Panpa awards since 1995.

She said client representative Robyn Gardener and the advertising representative at the Express, Alva O'Rourke, all had their part to play in creating the product.

"It wasn't just me ... Alva was instrumental in the whole campaign. Without her it wouldn't have ever happened. And Robyn from Marlborough Roads Safety in particular for loving our idea and for her input into the creative concepts.

"I annoyed the other designers at the Express with my attention to detail, making sure everything was 100 per cent. I was quite pedantic with the whole process and everything had to be perfect."

- The Marlborough Express

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