Capping an impressive year of recognition, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide has just scooped top honours as Network of the Year at the annual Asia Pacific PR Awards.

For the fifth year in a row, Ogilvy PR Asia Pacific outscored every other agency in total number of honours across a broad array of geographies and categories. Ogilvy PR picked up 13 honours – more than three times the number of the next highest scoring agency – and scored in more than half the campaign categories (11 of 18).

Separately, just last month Ogilvy PR was named Large Agency of the Year in the PR News Platinum PR Awards.

“We are on such an incredible roll. While we created award-winning work for our clients in categories ranging from technology to consumer marketing to CSR and public affairs, it’s great to see we took the top award in a new area in which we have invested so much this year – Digital Influence,” said Christopher Graves who has led Ogilvy PR as regional CEO for the past five years and now will take up the role of Global CEO.

Ogilvy PR won the “Best Use of Digital” category for a mysterious blind product trial strategy that delivered outstanding product feedback and credibility by the most influential beauty bloggers in China for Unilever’s Pond’s Age Miracle (PAM). With a jar of a mystery cream pitted against their usual prestige anti-aging cream for seven days, these expert bloggers, many of whom carry greater influence that traditional beauty media, gushed over how much better this mystery cream was, with 90% recommending it over their usual prestige brand. The Pond’s brand was revealed at the end of the seven day trial to a significant online buzz over the surprise result.

Fast Facts
1 Gold Award (Asia Pacific Network of the Year)
3 “Campaign of the Year” Top Awards
2 Certificates of Excellence
8 Honourable Mentions

Top Awards Won by Ogilvy PR Asia Pacific

Technique Awards – Best Use of Digital (Top Award) 
Campaign: Pond's Age Miracle Blogger Blind Trial
Client: Unilever
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Regional/ Shanghai

General Consumer Awards – Art, Entertainment & Media Campaign of the Year (Top Award) 
Campaign: Launching of the First Museum of Australian Democracy
Client: Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House
Agency: Pulse Communications, an Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Company, Australia

Corporate Awards – Crisis or Issues Management Campaign of the Year (Top Award) 
Campaign: Court of Public Opinion
Client: Henry Davis York
Agency: Cannings Corporate Communications, an Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Company, Australia


Gold Awards

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Asia Pacific won Asia Pacific Network of the Year


Ogilvy PR won two Certificates of Excellence and eight Honourable Mentions:

Corporate Awards – Crisis or Issues Management Campaign of the Year (Certificate of Excellence)
Campaign: Driving a great result for Ford Australia
Client: Ford Australia
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Australia

Industry Market Awards – Technology Campaign of the Year (Certificate of Excellence)
Campaign: Intel Blogathon 2009: 10 Bloggers. 24 Hours.
Client: Intel Technology Asia
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Singapore

Targeted Audience Awards – Employee Communications Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: Live Positively
Client: Coca-Cola South-Pacific
Agency: Impact Employee Communications, an Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Company, Australia

General Consumer Awards – Product Brand Development Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: PR Helps ANZ Empower Women
Client: ANZ
Agency: Pulse Communications, an Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Company, Australia

Industry Market Awards – Healthcare Ethical Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: A Butterfly Spreads its Wings in China
Client: Merck Serono
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, China

Industry Market Awards – Technology Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: Identifying Australia’s Great Productivity Gap
Client: Telstra
Agency: Howorth and Parker & Partners, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Companies, Australia

Industry Market Awards – Business-to-Business Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: UPS Asia Business Monitor - Helping SMEs Hunt for New Trails
Client: UPS Singapore Pte Ltd
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Hong Kong

Corporate Awards – Public Affairs Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention)
Campaign: "Do it your way" Active Aging Heroes
Client: Council for Third Age
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Singapore

Corporate Awards – Financial Communications Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention)
Campaign: A Game-changing Play for Changyou
Client: Changyou.com
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, China

Social Education & Philanthropy Awards – Corporate Social Responsibility Campaign of the Year (Honourable Mention) 
Campaign: Bridging the Gap from School to Society - The Autistic Youth Work Experience Program
Client: MSIG Insurance
Agency: Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Hong Kong

The Whitney Museum of American Art has launched its redesigned and expanded website, whitney.org. The new site incorporates innovative web technology and design to provide users with accessible and immediate ways to explore the Whitney’s exhibitions, programs, and preeminent collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art of the United States. As an integral part of the new site, the Whitney has commissioned the first in a series of Internet art projects, which will appear briefly throughout the site at sunset and sunrise in New York City, marked by the website's background changing from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa.

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director said, “Our redesigned website—with its dynamic content, compelling aesthetic, and uncomplicated approach to accessing art—reflects the Whitney’s ethos and provides a new window into the Museum. As we advance our plans to build a museum in downtown Manhattan near the High Line, the new whitney.org will bring our renowned collection and groundbreaking programming to the broadest public possible.”

The website redesign involved nearly every department in the Museum and was led by an in-house team drawn from the curatorial, development, education, graphic design, information technology, and marketing staff, in collaboration with the external design partnership Linked by Air. The site will be managed using a unique, shared wiki-based interface allowing staff members across the Museum to enter and manipulate text, images, audio, and video; vet content; and customize workflows to ensure accuracy and scholarship. This highly collaborative approach to site development and ongoing management is unique for a major cultural institution and allows for a distinct connection between Museum staff and the public.

For the first time, online visitors can explore a selection of nearly 400 works from the Whitney’s collection and an index of the more than 2,800 artists in the collection, indicating the number of works by each.

Images can be viewed at full-screen or larger, and many artists in the collection are represented by multiple works, for example Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol. A range of navigation tools allows users to explore the online collection alphabetically by artists’ names, chronologically by decade, or via an image-rich search feature, and works are flagged if they are currently on view in the Museum. Additional works and interpretive material will be added to the online collection on an ongoing basis.

The Whitney has commissioned a series of Internet art projects for the new website. Each project will appear on every page of whitney.org for ten to thirty seconds at sunset and sunrise in New York City, marked by the change of the website's background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa. Several projects will be commissioned annually, with each appearing on the site for three to four months.

Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media said, “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.”

First in the series is a project by the collaborative ecoarttech, founded in 2005 by artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. The project, Untitled Landscape #5, consists of fluctuating, glowing orbs of light that disrupt the "digital landscape." The size and speed of the orbs will vary based on the number of visitors to the site since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise); higher visitation results in larger, slower-moving orbs. Ecoarttech's work has consistently explored relationships between landscape, technology, and culture, and their commissioned work for the new Whitney site metaphorically explores the impact of visitors on the Museum's information environment.

A broad range of video and audio produced by the Whitney to accompany and enhance a physical or virtual visit illuminates current and past exhibitions, works in the collection, public programs, and performances. Visitors can stream or download interpretative materials, including audio guides for the collection and exhibitions, and short videos featuring behind-the-scenes artist and curator commentary, complete with transcripts.

Visitors to the site can register for personal accounts allowing them to create a collection of their favorite works of art, exhibitions, or pages on the site. Users can add captions, rearrange page elements via a drag-and-drop feature, create their own slideshows, and share links to their collection.

All pages of whitney.org can be shared via email and online communities including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and more. Visitors may subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified whenever site content is updated. Users can also add individual events and exhibitions to their personal calendar programs such as iCal, Outlook, and Google Calendar, or subscribe to receive automatic updates.

Museum hours by date, travel directions, and ticketing information are featured prominently on the
homepage. A versatile and easy-to-use online calendar allows visitors to view a comprehensive list of events and exhibitions by date, week, or month, as well as to filter results by categories such as member events, family programs, free events, gallery tours, and more. Information for parents and caregivers, including tips on planning a family visit and looking at art with kids, is available in a special section of the site called “For Kids.” Detailed information on access services and programs for visitors with disabilities is also available.

Alongside resources and easy-to-access, specialized content for families, teens, teachers, and adult audiences, the site incorporates blogs specific to each of these groups, allowing for more informal exchanges.

The site was built in Ruby on Rails, an open source web application framework, using the Economy content management system developed by Linked by Air and customized for the Whitney. Allowing for an agile development process and highly collaborative approach to content entry, Economy requires minimal technical skills and provides a unique, shared interface for Whitney staff and the public.

The new site was designed to provide equal functionality and information to all users. Individuals who are blind, partially sighted, deaf, or hard of hearing will be able to navigate through the site relying on sound and text alternatives such as transcripts, captions, optimal color contrasting, and explicit labeling for screen readers. Consultation and review of the new site in accordance with national accessibility guidelines was provided by The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media, WGBH Educational Foundation.