Black Tie Wins Nine Communicator Awards from the AIVA!
Let’s get one thing straight: The AIVA, or the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, is a pretty big deal. The Communicator Awards program, held annually by the AIVA, is the leading international creative awards program honoring creative excellence for communication professionals. Founded over two decades ago, The Communicator Awards is an annual competition meant to honor the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations, and identity work for print, video, interactive, and audio. We at Black Tie submitted several pieces of work for the 2016 judging session, contributing to the over 6,000 entries from other ad agencies, interactive agencies, production firms, in-house creative professionals, graphic designers, design firms, and public relations firms around the world.
We are previous winners of a W3 Award from AIVA for our work on the Viera Builders website, a unique project whose live SVGs (AKA responsive vector graphics) stole the show. This time, our hard work has yielded even more rewards, with three Awards of Excellence (gold) and six Awards of Distinction (silver) for our entries. If you thought we were proud of our team before, boy oh boy, are we thrilled now.
LENTEIN Scoops Up 6 AIVA Communicator Awards
LENTEIN, one of our outstanding clients, is the reason for quite a few of these awards. Considered the world’s most complete food source, LENTEIN is a high-protein food product that contains the nutritional qualities of water lentils. It’s a great idea and a remarkable product that helps the environment and our bodies simultaneously. However, many people living outside of the healthy living, environmental, or sustainability realms didn’t quite “get it.” That’s where we stepped in and created the website that helped them educate web users who were interested in this highly sustainable product.
“I was amazed and continue to be amazed by the quality of your work,” Cecilia, VP of Marketing over at Parabel (the mother company of LENTEIN), gushed, “Needless to say, I’m not the only one, and you have now been awarded recognition globally…others just have to follow on.”
With the help of a custom, 60-second explainer video alongside custom graphics on a one-page web design, LENTEIN grew wildly in popularity. This isn’t the first award the site and product have won, either! In 2015, LENTEIN entered into the IFT Food Festival in Chicago, IL, and was presented with the Food Product of the Year Award. We are thrilled that our hard and tireless work on everything from the explainer video to the graphics and clear, readable content on the site have created all the success that LENTEIN deserves, and we’re sure there’s more to come for them—and for us as their marketing agency of choice!
LENTEIN also earned us the silver Distinction Awards in the Environmental Awareness, Home Page, and Online Video Animation categories.
Another client we have to thank for the opportunity to make their dreams much, much bigger is Zipper Urogyn. After viewing their website (which we encourage you to do), it’s clear why we received an Award in Distinction for not just the Health Website category but also for similarly-styled print advertising.
Classic Design Still Appeals
Dr. Ralph Zipper and his practice, Zipper Urogynecology Associates, lives for nostalgia. With a female client base between the ages of 50 and 80, it was important for Dr. Zipper to create a vibe that appealed to the concept of looking and feeling youthful and relieving what are often embarrassing symptoms. The Black Tie team created a vintage vibe, with a heavily stylized website full of customized graphics that popped with color. That sentiment was mirrored in eight ads that have proven to not only comfort his patients, but increase his practice. Our work impressed the judges this year, as Dr. Zipper’s vision allowed us to win silver Distinction Awards for the “health website” and “print advertising” categories.
Dr. Ralph Zipper is appreciative of all the work we’ve done for him, and where it has taken his practice as well as our business: “If you’re running a business…I’m sure you have similar frustrations; people who are happy with mediocrity. Black Tie and Scott were a homerun find for me…They under-promise and over-deliver, and exceed all of my expectations.”
We couldn’t be more thankful for the opportunity to create these award-winning graphics for Zipper Urogyn.
Explainer Video Tells All
Similar to LENTEIN, Tabble had a great product to share with the world – an application that allows for groups, or “bubbles,” with subjects for businesses, individuals, or anything in between, but users weren’t grasping it on first glance. The concept needed to be explained for users to reap the full benefits of the app, so Black Tie went to work on creating an animated video. The entire process, from script-writing to the final animation edits, were done by our team, and the AIVA judges were fascinated—enough so to award us a Communicator Award with Distinction for our animation work.
Of course, whenever you submit something to be judged—especially by such an outstanding organization—you get some nerves, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. But there’s nothing like that “blown away” feeling you get when you receive the results in the mail, or over e-mail, with the results and see your business not just once, but nine times. We couldn’t have accomplished this without our hardworking team of creatives. With a constantly-developing team like ours, we’re sure to bring home the gold for our future designs, content, and development, all tied together on our innovative, custom websites.