Esparza snares two prestigious accolades
ABQ brewery, health chain ads earn gold
A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s Esparza Advertising’s goal to make that cliche into a reality.
This year, Esparza, an Albuquerque-based advertising agency, has garnered two Gold Regional American Advertising Awards. The Awards, formerly known as the Addy Awards, are given out by the American Advertising Federation and are considered the most prestigious awards in the advertising world.
Esparza won for a logo created for Dialogue Brewing, an Albuquerque brewery, and an advertising campaign for The Arbor Co., a national chain of senior living communities that specializes in dementia treatment and care.
The wins for Esparza are the only gold awards for a New Mexico agency in the Southwest region, which includes New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
Esparza has won four previous regional gold awards and numerous silver awards. In 2010, it got a National Gold Award for its “Brain Damage” campaign for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
The two 2017 winning campaigns could not be more different, but they each encompass Esparza’s philosophy: Simpler is better.
The idea is to create a “powerful image, but simple and elegant,” said Craig Berry of Esparza.
Dialogue Brewing, which is a combination meeting space and brewery at 1501 1st NW, is
focused on bringing people together over good beer and good conversation. The logo focuses on these two aspects by creating a simple, yellow and white symbol of a beer glass with a dialogue box acting as the foam.
The Arbor Co. campaign, in contrast, tasked Esparza with conveying complex and sensitive messages.
“Many times, with things like dementia, advertisers like to play it safe for fear of offending or being indelicate,” said Berry. “But Arbor came to us really wanting to push the boundaries, and I think we landed in a good place.”
Esparza managed to pack a lot of information into a tight package.
The ad campaign consists of a series of old family photographs with certain family members fading out, and a simple caption reading, “Lost Memory” followed by a number and the place and date where the photograph was taken.
“Our goal was to take something that everyone understands, dementia, but we wanted to make people experience it. Really get to them with emotional impact,” Berry said.
Esparza now moves on to the national competition in New Orleans on June 10, where it will face thousands of competitors from across the nation. It will enter its Arbor Co. campaign at the national level.