Rochester Advertising Federation holds ADDYs

The Rochester Advertising Federation, an affiliate of the American Advertising Federation, held its 26th annual American Advertising Awards–known as the ADDYs–on Thursday night with record-breaking attendance.

The event recognizes Rochester marketers and advertisers, and honored over 80 area professionals this year.

Nearly 560 people attended the event.

“I think that the ADDYs for our industry are more than an award show,” said Katelin Pellett, RAF president. “They’re an opportunity to network and to celebrate great work that’s coming out of a market that I think a lot of other cities might overlook. The exciting thing there’s a lot of people who’ve obviously made a choice to either stay or move back to Rochester that’s such a good message to tell our students–that you can go to a bigger market if that’s something that you want to do but Rochester is a really viable option for you.

“You can make a career here just as easily as you could in a bigger market and potentially be more successful here,” she added.

The “Best of Show” award–the night’s top prize–went to Truth Collective LLC for the second consecutive year. The agency was awarded the honor for its work with Lenscrafters and its “See. Good. Daily.” integrated advertising campaign.

The firm also took home the most honors with a total of 13 awards.

“A lot of people wonder, do creative awards matter?  The answers is yes when they celebrate the emotion and creativity that makes brands successful,” said Bob Bailey, partner at Truth Collective in a statement. “More often than not, insight and creativity are the real difference makers in the business lives of our clients. Given the level of competition, we’re thrilled to have earned the ‘Best of Show’ award two years running. It just hasn’t been done in recent years and we couldn’t be more excited for our clients whose work was recognized this year."

Other top award winners include Partners + Napier Inc. with 12 awards,  Dixon Schwabl Inc. with nine awards, and Optic Sky Productions LLC with nine awards.

“We’re proud to be working for incredible brands and even more proud to help to drive their business with disruptive, effective, award-winning work,” said Pete VonDerLinn, executive creative Director of Partners + Napier in a statement.

The first-ever RAF Scholarship was awarded to Rochester Institute of Technology’s Sarah Cipro for her work on “FLIP for Dye Hard Colorists.”

There were a total of 16 student awards distributed at the event across schools including Monroe Community College, Nazareth College, RIT, and Syracuse University.

The theme of the event was “Be Legendary.”

“The vision was playing off of the rock and roll music scene and this idea that a lot of times we hold rock stars up on pedestals and they rock out and they’re these legends that we all look up to,” RAF’s Pellett said.  “And there’s a lot of similarities to the advertising and marketing business and that every year people submit work and really the judges are tasked with deciding which work is most legendary.”

The event was held at the Joseph A. Floreano Rochester Riverside Convention Center.

The ADDYs show the strength of the local advertising market, Pellett says.

“If you look at our local and our regional area advertising has a big economic impact on it,”  she said. “We have hundreds of people working in that industry here. The ADDYs are kind of the culmination of all of that; celebrating this crazy business that we decided to be in but also recognizing that it is a competition (and) it’s a chance to celebrate too.”

Follow Kerry Feltner on Twitter: @KerryFeltner

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