New England DMers Awarded for Doing More With Less

HuntDirect, Mullen, Silverscape, Sullivan Creative Services, Ltd. And L.W. Robbins Associates were the big winners in “Direct Marketing on a Shoestring Awards,” presented in Boston last week as part of the New England Direct Marketing Association’s Awards for Creative Excellence.

HuntDirect took top honors in the budget under $20,000 category for the “Surecoin Security Coin Bag” campaign for B2 Direct/Clarke American, while Mullen came in first in the budget under $10,000 category for the “GMC Envoy” campaign for GM Women’s Initiative.

Sullivan’s wooden postcard mailing nabbed first place in the self promotion under $10,000 race, as did Silverscape for an under $1,000 campaign for Sycamore Network Inc.’s optical switching telecom hardware.

In the “Cheap for a Good Cause” nonprofit category, L.W. Robbins came in first with its “Don’t Slaughter Baby Horses” effort for United Animal Nations.

The Shoestring Awards were first presented in 1991, said Alan Rosenspan, president of Alan Rosenspan & Associates, Newton, MA.

” [At the time,] I worked for a big agency which is Digitas now, and we dominated the NEDMA awards show,” he said. “We saw smaller companies not entering because there is no way that they could win and compete against [larger agencies’] budgets. So we started the Shoestring Awards and got a great reaction to it.”

Alexandra MacAaron, a partner with Rosenspan, helped judge this year’s NEDMA awards. “We were thrilled, we got more entries overall than we had for the last five years or so,” she said. “We’re hoping that shows that the economy might be picking up.”

The first year the Shoestrings were presented, MacAaron herself was a winner. “I hadn’t met Alan yet,” she said, “but I entered and won an award for a two-color piece we did for a little tiny division of Wang.”

“Sometimes that kind of [financial] constraint can make you do the most creative things,” noted Walter Charles Bumford III, also a partner with Rosenspan. “You have to figure out the most ‘Zen’ way you can do it, so it forces you into a more creative solution.”