Kosovo's First Annual Packaging Design Competition Award Ceremony

You know the song that sings, 'It's better to burn out than to fade away?' Well, I guess you could say the close-out for my 2 year consulting contract in Kosovo has followed this tune. As some of you may have read in an early blog posting I came up with this idea to create a packaging design competition to improve the design agencies ability to produce professional labels as well as increase the demand and awareness among local food and beverage producers for this type of professional packaging. Well 6 months of work all came to a head last week as I produced the final Award Ceremony to announce the winners and hand out the trophies and prizes to the designers and winning companies. It was a huge success with over 150 people, including many VIP's, head of USAID, all the designers and many of the local businesses. It was filmed and rebroadcast in a 1 hour TV special and received very high marks from the Press and from my project. Best of all it is now being taken over by a local consulting firm I had pitched the idea to so Kosovo will hopefully continue to develop in this area for many years to come.

The whole program required an amazing amount of work but thanks to the assistance from the consulting firm and the cooperation of a national TV station I had brought in as a media partner, it all went off smoothly. Best of all were several videos shown during the event featuring an agency in Chicago, Akimbo, that agreed to be one of the 5 international judges, pro-bono. Their entire agency reviewed all the different label concepts submitted by the 6 local design firms and completed detailed scorecards adding comments so the designers here could learn from this experience and improve their work for clients in the future. The video worked it's way from the outside of their offices all the way through them actually judging the work. A highlight for me was to see my old agency, Leo Burnett, located directly across the street from them. A sight I haven't seen in almost 10 years. The second video was filmed over the 6 weeks of work the designers invested in the project highlight how they produced their concepts and it was choreographed to some good ole rock and roll.

A Press Conference was held afterward with everyone talking about the innovation of such an event and the fact that all the five businesses plan to hire the design firms to complete the work and launch the new products in the market as soon as possible. A win win for everyone.

One of the international judges, Ilan Geva, had agreed early on to fly out to Kosovo pro-bono to hand out the awards after explaining how the judging panel worked. And for the following 2 days after the celebration he worked with the winning 3 agencies to train them on how to do more professional design work in the future. A huge added value for each of the winners. And for his final day here we tried to show him around Kosovo a bit and braved the thunderstorms to arrive at a great lakeside restaurant in the northwestern most point of Kosovo at the Serbia border. For someone who grew up in Israel nothing out here seemed to faze him and believe he had a really nice time while helping take Kosovo design work to a whole new level