FCB Chicago wins first annual Cresta prize dedicated to writing
The Last Barf Bag, a project from Dramamine, the motion sickness prevention drug, that celebrated the curious and threatened hobby of collecting airline nausea bags, has won the first Alan Page Award for Writing. The new annual honor has been launched by the Cresta Awards in memory of its President, Alan Page.
The integrated campaign by FCB Chicago won four gold trophies in the Cresta Awards 2024 competition but has now been selected by a special jury to win the overall writing excellence prize. It was specifically given for a 13 minute-long short documentary that is one of the key components of the campaign.
Page, who died in 2023, was an award-winning creative director and copywriter. The Page family, together with Lewis Blackwell, Cresta's CEO, chose to honor his memory with a special award focused on writing, the craft area that he excelled in and in which he was particularly keen to champion and to seek out the latest innovation and outstanding work and talents. Monique Kaplan, Executive Creative Director at FCB Chicago, was thrilled to receive the award on behalf of the creative team. “Writing is so important in advertising, it's a craft that really can take your work from good to incredible. But at times it can seem like it's a bit of a dying craft - everything is 'idea first', which I fully support but when you can come up with incredible ideas and you have the writing skill to turn them into magic, it's gold. There's nothing better.”
The long-form documentary format was new for both agency and client, an exciting departure from the more traditional 30 sec ad. “We did some digging, and it was ''wow, this is pretty amazing. I can't believe this community [of barf bag collectors] exists!' And it was coincidence after coincidence because we discovered that the barf bag was invented in 1949, and Dramamine was invented in 1949, and we pieced this entire story together”.
The writing process was new too, with a script outline created ahead of the documentary shoot but then a rewrite once they had the footage. “The script is kind of a loose narrative of what we want. But if we capture magic on the day, that's going to change things, because we're going to make sure we capture that”. Taylor Walker, account lead on Dramamine, explained how it was a four-month endeavor with the writing team using literally hundreds of pages of transcript from the documentary footage to craft the language for the wider campaign.
And, although as funny as some of the best mockumentaries, Taylor and Monique were keen to stress that it is a documentary. “That was something we knew was going to be contentious. Like, 'is this for real?'. It was important for us that it's a documentary. It's real. This is real stuff. This is real people. I mean, there's nothing about it that's actually made up.”
The success has further emboldened the team to experiment with different formats. “Yeah, we've got the bug! Absolutely, I think it's raised the bar, everybody's, like 'well, is it as good as Dramamine?’”
Blackwell added: “We're delighted that such an original, enjoyable work emerged from our various deliberations to be recognized for the first Alan Page Award. It's a lovely piece of work, fully of warmth, humor and empathy. The writing is immense and yet almost invisible. It creates a framework for a story to be explored and then shapes it into a perfect construction that says a lot but seemingly without trying.”
He added that the award has deliberately been left until some time after the rest of the award winners were announced. “We asked a range of people, from varying creative backgrounds to act as jurors for this special award, as well as drew on some of the regular jurors. It took a little while for what was ultimately a unanimous winner to emerge. And then it seemed right to announce it as the last point of the awards cycle.. and just ahead of our new call for entries!”
Cresta Awards 2025 is opens for entries from 11 February until 20 July.
