Grand Jury Perspective with Toshiya Kondo
The AME Awards international Grand Jury represents some of the world’s most creative and strategic minds in advertising, marketing, and communications. AME recruits these prominent award-winning industry execs, known globally for their strategic expertise and creative expertise, and tasks them with selecting the World’s Best Advertising & Marketing Effectiveness.
With Juries representing 5 regions, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East & Africa, and North America, all AME’s entries are judged on cultural relevance.
The AME Jury evaluates entries with the utmost attention in two rounds of judging. Following regional judging, the international Grand Jury reviews all Gold-winning work from all regions in an additional round of judging to determine a Platinum Award for each of the five regions.
This week’s Grand Jury Perspective features 2018 AME Grand Jury member (Asia-Pacific) Toshiya Kondo, Director of Strategic Planning for Dentsu. Japan. Toshiya brings 14 years of strategic and creative experience to the AME Grand Jury. As Director of Strategic planning, he leads the broad area of integrated planning. With vast experience executing effective marketing campaigns for a variety prominent brands including Suntory beverage and food, Honda, Nikon, Resona bank, and Kabu.com securities, Toshiya always seeks the best mixture of social-foresight/consumer-insight, internal/external branding, and online/offline execution, based on effective marketing goal settings.
Toshiya spent a few minutes with AME sharing his creative insights on judging, the use of technology within the industry, emerging trends, what inspires him, and more.
AME Awards: Does judging the year’s creative work within your industry influence your creative process?
Toshiya Kondo: Yes. In terms of my new position, the Honda account, the field of global branding, from the viewpoint of headquarter Japan, is going to be very important. I would like to grasp the trends of global and local branding case study throughout AME awards process.
AME Awards: Why did you agree to judge this year’s AME Awards?
Toshiya Kondo: I am very appreciative that AME is giving me such a good chance.
AME Awards: In your opinion how does cultural/social change influence regional work?
Toshiya Kondo: Very much. Local context always changes. Winning marketing must take advantage of constantly changing contexts, in terms of cost efficiency.
AME Awards: In your opinion which brands have utilized technology in a unique way to attract the digital consumer and do breakthrough creative work?
Toshiya Kondo: Every brand. Technology is now standard in marketing. However, cutting-edge technology is often fragile and sometimes seems overestimated.
AME Awards: What creative trends are emerging and how will those trends affect creative?
Toshiya Kondo: The Industry wants effective types of integration. It’s gonna be the whole trend of marketing/planning that not only defines the goal of “what to say”, but defines that of what to do, which means integration, and, I think, not special in Japan.
AME Awards: In your opinion, what is your favorite ad that embodies both creativity and effectiveness?
Toshiya Kondo: One of my most respected clients, Suntory, evaluated me as the best agency man among tons of staff members within the agency, which had made me a director position.
The brand is natural mineral water. Not only is it winning the top share of water category, this year it’s going to be the top of top sales brand among the whole non-alcohol drink brand within years. Right now, it’s #2, but it is supposed to be #1 within years.
AME Awards: What inspires you about the industry?
Toshiya Kondo: The good thing about working at Dentsu is that we can share all the updated new marketing studies, even if they are a success or not. We have a chance to know all the brand activities, whether they are effective or not, AS LONG AS they are in Japan. Haha.
Again, I would like to study global marketing trends throughout AME jury process.
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