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DIGITAL KITCHEN’S EXPANSION into all things digital started with the hiring of interactive heavy-hitter Jeff Brecker for the newly created position of executive producer/general manager. He starts June 21.

Brecker has been on the internet side of advertising since he entered the adbiz in 1996, after graduating from UW-Madison. He moved to Digital Kitchen from three years at Leo Burnett, where he’d been SVP/creative director.

Winning advertising competitions are so indispensable to the advertising business that agencies have been known to go to extreme measures to attempt to win those shiny gold trophies at prestigious festivals.

For the past 11 years, the Gunn Report keeps track of this multi-million dollar, worldwide industry, by tracking and analyzing the best-regarded advertising or countries which produce it.

It names the year’s most awarded production houses, directors, agencies, spots, interactive projects and integrated advertising.

Leo Burnett, the agency whose signature was big bowls of apples that greeted guests, has hired a Big Apple creative star and modern Peggy Olsen story as its chief creative officer.

Susan Credle joins the Publicis Groupe-owned agency Oct. 5 after 24 years at BBDO, New York, the last 10 as its high profile EVP/executive creative director.

She was hired after an eight month aggressive internal and external search to succeed John Condon, who left the agency last February.

At Burnett, she will oversee the creative output at both the agency and its Arc Worldwide subsidiary.

THE COLONIE’S BOB ACKERMAN edited a Joe Pytka-directed 11 spot mixed media package of Hallmark spots, with a sound track backed by the Grammy winner John Mayer’s song, “Say,” for Leo Burnett.

In the package were 15-second value spots, two 30s, a long-format, 1:45 spot for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and spots comprised of the 15s for the web.

“The nice thing about Hallmark is that, contrary to trends, they still concentrate on storytelling to elevate their brand,” says Ackerman, who has edited Hallmark commercials for the past seven years.

When it comes to TV commercial awards shows, the number of Chicago winners is usually in the low single digits, and those winners tend to be the big, familiar names.

While the big, familiar agencies swept last week’s Chicago-based 2009 Hugo Television competition, this time the number of local winners was huge — an incredible 33 out of 85 awards!

Leo Burnett was Hugo’s mighty top dog. It won the single Gold Hugo award for Best Commercial for McDonald’s “Kung Food” spot, plus seven other prizes, edging out worthy competitor DDB by only one award.

Dear Ruth: I am deeply concerned with the story you ran and I’d like to request that you correct all the factual inaccuracies contained therein immediately, namely:

• We have donated a significant amount of our agency’s time and talent to bringing the Olympics here to Chicago and we’ve been honored to do so.
• While every hiring decision is ultimately determined by the 2016 Olympic Bid Committee, we have worked together to ensure that every effort has been ? and will continue to be – made to use not only local suppliers, but also minority and diversity suppliers.
  

Leo Burnett imported Los Angeles directors and personnel to shoot footage for Chicago 2016 Olympic “bid films” aimed at showing the International Olympic Committee’s Evaluation Commission that Chicago is a city worthy of hosting the Olympics.

Although Leo Burnett and its Chicago 2016 Olympic (OC) client bypassed Chicago production companies to shoot beauty shots of their city, they twisted some local vendors’ arms for the lowest possible rates for last week’s shoot.

What also stung was that the L.A. production companies sent in L.A.

As of Monday, April 28, Audio Producers Group (APG) will conduct its first session in a studio across the street from the Leo Burnett building, after four years as an outside-operated, in-house production service within the Burnett agency.

Partners Mindy Verson and David Kaplan purchased a new, 1,500-sq. ft. condo at 200 N. Dearborn, a 309-unit building recently converted to condos from rentals by American Invsco.

APG offers voicecasting, Verson’s expertise, voice recording, sound design, sound effects and manipulation, digital sound mixing and duplication.

Two DraftFCB commercials led the 43rd Hugo Awards last week, where Chicago ad agencies dominated the awards, marking a nice change from Chicago’s near invisibility in other competitons, with notable exceptions, of course.

The Hugo Awards, the television component of the Chicago International Film Festival, were presented before a sell-out audience at the Cultural Center.

DraftFCB’s corporate identity spot, “Babysitter,” won the Audience Choice Award as voted by 100,000 viewers of Ch. 11’s “Image Union,” which screened all spot finalists.

It was no contest Wednesday night as Leo Burnett pulverized its nearest competition to take home 14 individual and two Best of Show awards at the 3rd Annual Chicago Creative Club awards at the Auditorium Theatre.

DDB Chicago was a distant second with half of Burnett’s prizes.

Leo Burnett scored two Best of Show prizes, Altoids, television and McDonald’s, print. DDB/Anheuser-Busch won a Best for radio.

Leo Burnett/Altoids mopped up television awards: 30-second Single, 30-second Campaign, Cinematography, Direction and Editing, plus Music for Pontiac.

“Milan is a beautiful city. It’s a true European working city, very much like Chicago,” said director/DP Michael Neumann of One World Productions.

He recently shot a neo sci-fi style commercial for Italy’s IMITEC home products on a set 60 feet below the surface in Passante Ferroviario, Milan’s high-tech subway system.

“It looked a lot like a wind tunnel, very modern and huge,” said Neumann. “The Milan subway just makes you gasp, puts you in awe.”

A nutshell visual: Three models in custom leather skintight jumpsuits, standing in the vast wind tunnel.

Voiceover superstar Harlan Hogan has returned to the legitimate theatre for the first time in more than 25 years. Looking very dapper and trim in a well-fitted double-breasted suit, Hogan plays Edvard Lunt, a famous novelist and a bridegroom, in “Impossible Marriage,” a comedy by Beth Henley.

Nothing goes according to plan in this Southern Gothic comedy, set in a splendid garden (kudos to scenic designer Joey Wade).

But Hogan does get the much-younger-girl before the final curtain, even if her wedding gown includes giant, iridescent butterfly wings.

Call it the battle of the big agencies shooting it out for honors at the recent second annual Chicago Creative Club Awards show. Four big agencies won 29 of the 32 categories of awards, while Leo Burnett won half, with 16 prizes mostly for Altoids gum.

DDB brought home seven Bricks (the award trophy) for Anheuser-Busch/Budweiser and Young & Rubicam won six awards mainly Miller Brewing.

Two business friends have launched an idea whose time has come: An outside-operated in-house production service within a major agency. Chicago Recording veterans Mindy Verson and David Kaplan own-and-operate Audio Producers Group (APG) on the second floor of Leo Burnett’s offices on Wacker Drive. Engineer is Donovan Weyland, another CRC ex-staffer, and his assistant is Jeff Leibovich.

Joe Pytka departed from his signature grunge look to deck himself out in a tux, his long blondish-gray flowing around his shoulders, to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hugos at Park West March 11.

Pytka, the Pittsburgh director who made good in Hollywood and the undisputed master of 30-second storytelling, has directed 5,000 commercials, many of them for long-time clients DDB and Leo Burnett, which were represented by top creatives Bob Scarpelli and Cheryl Berman, respectively.

An estimated 150 school and college students demonstrated March 28 outside the Leo Burnett building at Wacker and Dearborn, protesting the agency’s “Army of One” ad campaign, which they charge is deceptive and aggressively targets low-income African American and Latino youth for U.S. Army recruitment.

John Ennis is the ‘Man With A Van’

Come March, “Man with a Van,” a comedy short with sitcom ambitions, starts out on the festival route. The Aspen Comedy Festival was scheduled to be its first stop, but the festival rejected its application.