So the winners of the Mena Cristal Awards 2008/2009 have been chosen and announced, and we thought we’d update you with some of the highlights. To be honest they were a bit disappointing, due mainly to our belief that the region can and has done a lot better than this, still the next few are mention-worthy…

Leo Burnett Cairo dominated the film and magazine categories with work for Heinz and LinkDotNet.







  
Outdoor Cristal went to the Bare Essentials’ one breasted mannequin (previously featured on adbasha), compliments of Memac Ogilvy Group, Dubai. The Ambient Cristal went to the Volvo soft speed bump stunt also from Memac Ogilvy Group, Dubai. 

The Aveo 5 totallystreet.com website that we mentioned from the shortlist (link) won a Cyber Cristal in the Automotiv product website category. Same applies to the Mo’men Burrito campaign (link) that we’ve loved from the start which won in the Film category. Not to mention Nando’s Fred the chicken (link) by Leo Burnett, Dubai in the obscure Advertisers Media catergory.

Generally the MENA Cristal Awards website is frustrating, again because they do not provide links to the winners’ campaigns. We were also thrown off by the weird categorization of the awards, check it out for yourself and see if you can make heads or tails of it (menacristal.com).

One interesting feature is the country rankings. The number one agency in the UAE is JWT, Impact BBDO for Lebanon and FP7 for Egypt.