Change is the winner

The Grand Prix at this year's Atticus awards has been scooped by a dictionary designed to capture "irreversible shifts in the marketplace" that businesses can take on board

Changing language: terms like 23andMe can provide an action point around which brands and people can engage differently

Staff Reporter

BATES 141 Singapore's Guillaume Pagnoux and Frederique Covington have taken the Grand Prix in this year's Atticus awards for their inventive publication Dictionary of Change - described as "an annual handbook to inspire new ideas on how brands can engage with people".

The Bates publication, winner of the Market Research and Insights category, was voted unanimously as the Grand Prix winner from a record 275 entries, whittled down to a shortlist of 25. It came out narrowly ahead of the blog written for Campaign magazine by Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy London, which was the winner of the Advertising category and was lavishly praised for the quality of its writing.

Bates' Dictionary of Change is a collection of 137 'change words' that were chosen from thousands of suggestions, and were each selected to capture an irreversible shift in the market place, which could be harnessed by businesses. At the time it was published, Covington, who is regional executive planning director for Bates 141, said: "While trends have become a commodity and are rarely actionable, we distil our tracking of change into ChangePoints - insights to inspire new ideas on how brands and people can engage differently, via new products, new experiences, new distribution avenues or simply a new language."

And Jeffrey Yu, chairman of Bates 141 explained: "Language is one of the richest areas where change can be spotted and this is why we chose to publish the first Dictionary of Change." The book will be published each year, and Bates 141 is currently compiling terms for the 2009 edition.

The Atticus judges this year were Simon Clift, global chief marketing officer of Unilever; Rik Kirkland, director of publishing at McKinsey & Co; and Judie Lannon, editor of Market Leader magazine. All said that the standard of shortlisted entries had been highly impressive and had exceeded their expectations.

Three books were among the other winners: Rohit Bhargava's Personality Not Included in the Branding and Identity category; Allen Adamson's Brand Digital in the Digital Communications category; and John Gerzema's Brand Bubble in Strategy. Ogilvy dominated the awards, winning four categories in all; while Landor took the Digital, Corporate and Under-30 Essay prizes. Between them, the winners will share $55,000 in cash prizes, and edited versions of the winning entries will be published in the Atticus Journal later this year, while highlights of Atticus will also be shared with the wider world online at WPP's Reading Room and through WARC, one of the world's premier providers of information and insight to the global marketing, advertising, media and research industries.


Source: The WIRE - Issue 33