Doritos Changing the Game Wins A Lion for Goodby Silverstein

Congrats to Alex Burke and the whole team at GSP for yet another Cannes Lion.

Despite some voice actors desires to list Addy’s Telly’s, Lions, Clio’s and other awards on their resumes, websites or foreheads, there really aren’t any awards for voice over. At best, we voice guys and girls must simply take a small amount of pride in the accomplishments of those who hire us. Sometimes, we don’t even know that some project we did voice over for may have won huge accolades. For example, I did some v.o. a few years back for somebody who looked familiar. At the end of the session, we figured out that I had actually worked for him years prior. Oh and by the way, that spot won a Clio. I actually asked the producer “If a spot I did v.o. for won a Clio, then why didn’t you hire me for 8 years?” I then chimed in “If it was me, I’d have not only remembered everyone that had anything to do with the spot, but I’d have kept their numbers on speed dial.” I believe his response was “Yeah, uhhhhm, right.” It might not have been the best thing to say, because it’s been 4 years and he hasn’t called.

So, while admitting that I was perhaps an infinitesimal spec of a contributor to a project that Goodby Silverstein and Partners won a 2011 Cannes Lion for, I must act like the showman I am and take a small bow.

Chances are good that you heard my voice, as apparently several million people visited www.Doritoschangethegame.com Sadly, the site currently simply says that the promotion is over. However, a few months ago, had you gone there, you would have heard me, in my best NFL Films voice encouraging you to vote for your choice of NFL player to emblazon the cover of Madden NFL 11.  By the way, the player you ultimately voted to be on the cover of Madden NFL 11 is Drew Breez.

While I do still get to do a bit of copywriting, commercial making and wear other hats besides that of being a voice over actor, it’s rather rare that I get to win much of anything. Truth be told, the entry fee for many of the competitions is often higher than what I might have actually got paid to do the work in the first place. So, while some of this work may indeed be of award winning caliber, it generally goes unrecognized. Perhaps that might be part of the reason why I get so excited when I find out that as a voice actor, something I’ve done voices for has won a nice award. If you visit the Cannes site at http://www.canneslions.com/work/media/entry.cfm?entryid=6339&award=4, you’ll get to see a nice synopsis of the project, along with the names of the creative team. There was a lot more to this promotion than just the website and there were several other voice talent used, along with plenty of graphic designers, HTML programmers, videographers, photographers, lighting and sound people, and so on. I hope that they are all as excited as I am to have worked on something that was this successful. Although, it’s quite conceivable that many of them don’t even know. 

I found out simply by stumbling across the Goodby Silverstein Fan page on Facebook and their 3^rd post in mentioned that they had won for Doritos Change the Game. Otherwise, I might never have found out until perhaps 5 or 8 years from now, when I went to do a v.o. job and the client and I figure out that we had worked together before and “Oh, by the way, it won a Lion”…

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