Dual communications success on the 140th birthday of the Liszt Academy

As we have already reported, the 40-second spot Lisztery summing up the ars poetica of the Liszt Academy Concert Centre won the music conservatory a second Red Dot Design Award. This year’s list of winners of the accolade, considered the ‘Oscar’ of prizes within the global communications profession, was published in September 2015, although the awards ceremony only took place a few days ago, on 6 November, at the Red Dot gala (looked on as the annual summit of the creative industry) in Berlin’s Konzerthaus. Communications director Imre Szabó Stein and former student Kutrik Bence, composer of the ad’s music, were on stage to collect the prize on behalf of the Liszt Academy.

The Liszt Academy – 140 years of music campaign was prepared almost as a counterweight to the image clip which proved to be an absolute hit abroad in spring 2015: it also attracted the attention of professionals on the BBC.com channel and won a Silver Hugo as the best in its category at the 2015 Chicago Film Festival. The calligraphic artwork combining the main façade of the iconic building of the institution celebrating its 140^th anniversary and the striking cyan of renewal penetrate to the most profound essence of the Liszt Academy. The creative based on the visual comprehension of music in the form of notes drawn on music paper debuted with the concert magazine presented in May 2015. It went on to feature in a wide-scale poster and press campaign, and was also watched by TV audiences in the form of a short animation film.

The campaign, the brainchild of the Liszt Academy’s Communications Directorate headed by Imre Szabó Stein, and its creative agency, Allison Advertising Kft., won first prize in the ‘Brochures, leaflets, posters, DM’ category of the 2015 Mediadesign competition, coming ahead of entries such as Müpa Budapest’s poster promoting the Wagner Days. (Earlier, the Liszt Academy’s completely redesigned institutional image and publication portfolio also picked up an award at the competition of the Hungarian advertising and media market first launched two years ago.) The Mediadesign gold, the Red Dot award and the Design Management diploma collected at the end of September take to ten the number of creative industry prizes garnered by the Liszt Academy. “It is a massive achievement that in the last two years, the Liszt Academy’s communication is deemed worthy of so many prestigious awards. What is more, the closing chord to this symphony of prizes is symbolic in that whereas the Red Dot Design Award is the powerful reaction of international public opinion to the somewhat provocative image clip of the Concert Centre, the Mediadesign gold medal is the counterpoint to this, that is, domestic recognition of the 140 Campaign focusing on the traditional values of the Liszt Academy. For a moment, this places home and abroad, patina and progress, in perfect balance,” said communications director Imre Szabó Stein in his assessment of the significance of the awards.