Charlie Connell wins Ad Person of the Year!
By Louis Llovio | Richmond Times-Dispatch
Published: April 16, 2011
Image Credit: EVA RUSSO/TIMES-DISPATCH
Charlie Connell sat on an airplane about two weeks ago when he got the big news that he had been chosen as Richmond’s Ad Person of the Year, one of the area’s most prestigious advertising awards.
“My first reaction was: ‘You’re kidding,’ ” Connell said. “It was a huge surprise.”
He was recognized Friday night during the Ad Club’s annual Richmond show.
Connell, managing partner of the creative firm Punch, joins top local and national advertising industry veterans such as Harry Jacobs of The Martin Agency, Cabell Harris of WORK Labs and Rick Boyko of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter graduate advertising school as recipients of the award. The local ad club also handed out awards for the best advertising work in the area. More than 300 people attended the show.
Punch was formed in 2004 when Connell and business partner Kelly Adams merged their companies.
Connell had founded Briarpatch, an art-design firm, in 1992 but was growing too fast to accommodate the amount of business he was doing. Adams owned OIC, a print and paper products company.
Punch has its office on West Cary Street, and its roster of clients includes Sewell Plastic Surgery, Children Incorporated and Loveland Distributing Co.
Friday night’s awards to professionals were presented in four categories of work: design, interactive, advertising and production. There is also a category for student work.
Looking at the creativity on display from the winners, both by local agencies and students, “and it should be obvious to anyone looking at Richmond that we are a creative powerhouse,” said Edward Baldwin, president of the Richmond Ad Club.
Winners received gold, silver or bronze cannonballs.
The top work in each category wins best in show:
• In the design category: WORK Labs won best in show for the member booklet for its creative think tank Lab Rats.
• In the interactive category: The Martin Agency took the top award for the American Cancer Society’s “Happy Birthday” website.
• In the advertising category: Barber Martin won for “Forest,” a commercial for its client the Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth.
• In the production category: Black Iris, a company that creates compositions and scores for advertising, TV and film, won for its original musical score for Toyota.
One of the evening’s big winners was Brian Jang, a first-year student at the Brandcenter, who won the $5,000 Harry Jacobs Scholarship. He competed with other Brandcenter students, with the finalists having to make a presentation.
He was chosen, in part, because of his creative concept for rebranding a “reaction ball,” which is used to train athletes. The ball, which has six sides and bounces in unpredictable directions, helps athletes develop better reaction time.
Jang said the ball and its unpredictable bounce can be marketed to Brandcenter students to help spur creativity.
In his creative brief for the product, Jang wrote that randomness is one of the “ingredients for breaking out of patterns and finding original territory.”
Click here for original article: Richmond Times-Dispatch
