Who doesn't want to be awesome?

That was the question posed when the Ad Club of Washington came knocking and asked WIT to host the 2008 ADDY awards. The Battle for Awesomeness was the theme for this year's event, and there were heaps of awesome advertising up for awards. WIT's job was to liven things up a bit and host the festivities for the second year running. That meant providing live comedy and quickly creating some video elements to carry the night along.

Mike Bass and Tyler Korba lead the charge on the video front, producing some of WIT's most ambitious film work to date. "The basic idea was to create a package for the Battle of Awesomeness that felt like the Fight Night promos you see on ESPN or Showtime," says Korba. "We took aim at that kind of genre and tried to pull out every cliché we could think of. We shot everyone against a black backdrop over two days and overcranked everything to get that really dramatic slow-motion effect.

Add in some mist from a little hand-held water bottle, and you've got a pretty over-the-top look."

With editing and audio help from Henninger Media in DC and Virginia, the team finished eight pieces for the show, each one introducing a different award category for the night. "They're more like character sketches, really," says Korba. "We wanted the whole thing to have one unified look and feel as a package, but give each of our players the opportunity to riff within their indivudual categories and have some fun."

"I was really proud of our stuff," says Bass. "After the awards, a man asked me who made those videos for us. He was really surprised when I told them we made them ourselves. 'Well who wrote them for you?,' he asked. I love the reaction we get when we tell people our stuff is improvised.

Now, if that guy would only hire us to do his next ad campaign, the night will have been a HUGE success."

With the video elements under way, the team turned their attention to the live event. With only a few weeks for the hosting team to get ready, there were plenty of late night meetings and a healthy amount of emails back and forth to generate ideas. Mike Bass, Mark Chalfant, Mikael Johnson, Karen Salisbury-Lange, Sean Murphy, Honora Talbott and musician Travis Ploeger decided to come dressed as fight referees (in white shirts with bowties) and do their best to play with every boxing and wrestling reference they could think of.

"I had a lot more fun hosting the ADDYs this year," Bass reveals. "Last year we essentially scripted an entire evening's performance, which was well-received, but stressful for us. This year we just had a lot more fun with the audience, mixing planned bits with improvised shtick. We were able to read what the audience wanted and deliver it on the spot. It was the perfect opportunity for improvised entertainment."

Making things easier was the fantastic set that the Ad Club had built, complete with a boxing ring in place of the usual presentation stage, a follow-spot and an old-timey microphone that lowered down into the center ring.

"The ADDY committee did a real bang-up job creating a fight-night environment for the show," agrees Bass. "Inserting our own brand of comedy into that was very fun."

"There were two great highlights of the night for me," says Chalfant. "The first was getting to announce the Addy awards won by Rosenthal Partners and General Design Co. for the amazing work they each produced for WIT."

"The second was running into the audience unannounced and getting Arnold Worldwide's Karen Riordan (a co-chair of the Addy Awards Committee) to take a swig from the boxer's water bottle and spit it in to a bucket.

Classy lady in a pretty dress spitting in a bucket equals hilarious!"

All in all, it was another successful night for WIT at the ADDYs. "We need to thank the crew at Henninger for helping us get everything done on such a short timeline," says Korba. "We literally couldn't have done it without them."

"Working with the awesome people at Henninger was a real treat," agrees Bass. "They were able to really make the videos pop with their sound design. Our videos were being shown right alongside ADDY-winning videos and looked (and sounded) like they belonged."

"It was a pleasure to get to know and work with the team of folks from Arnold Worldwide who brought us into the process," says Chalfant, "and it was especially fun to once again collaborate with the indomitable Carol Montoya at the DC Ad Club- the lynchpin in the whole shebang."

Click on the images and links to the left to check out this year's video work. Click here to see the award-winning work from Rosenthal Partners, and here to see the General Design Co. winning campaign. WIT group picture courtesy of Mark at borcheltphoto.com. The revolution will be improvised.

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