"I saw on Facebook that you won an award," began the email from my sister-in-law. "And you actually showed up in New York to receive it so it must be a big deal. Congratulations!"

So it has been, winning our first Effie award. The type of work we do, the clients we work with, the people who work here, and the place we live are all so different from the big corporate agency world that dominates not only advertising awards shows but American culture, that it can be difficult to place our achievement in proper context. If you don't know what the Effies are or haven't experienced them first hand, it's hard to grasp their significance.

Yet here we were Tuesday night, all dressed up in the cavernous hall of Cipriani across from Grand Central Station. Joining us at table 35 were a few senior people from the renowned creative firm David and Goliath of Los Angeles. David and Goliath. How fitting.

By global agency standards, they're small too, with maybe 150 people on staff. Still independently owned. Their premise as an agency is to work with challenger brands, hence the name of the agency. It's smart positioning. Of course, if they are indeed a David, then what are we? Mini-David? This is Proper Effie Context Point #1: Small agencies of our size rarely win Effies. With a staff of just 21, we were certainly the smallest firm to win an Effie award this year, and perhaps one of the smallest ever. We were the first agency to win an Effie from Montana and as near as we can tell the first in the entire northern Rockies region.

While food was being served, we watched clips of all the campaigns that were nominated. Our colleagues at David and Goliath were nominated for their work for the Kia Soul, a car you wouldn't be caught dead in where we live. It's a perfectly fine car that they've helped find a lot of success, but you are not going to see anyone with any Montana street (er, gravel road) cred behind the wheel of a Soul in this decade, if ever. This is Proper Effie Context Point #2: Effies stand for effectiveness. The reason the Kia campaign was nominated was the same reason our campaign for Montana was nominated. Both campaigns were effective because they were highly focused on the most likely buyer and didn't try to be all things to all people.

Technically, the Effies are not a competition. You win gold, silver or bronze based on the merits of your own work. But realistically, we're human. We want to beat the other guys. Fortunately, our work was in the travel and tourism category while David and Goliath was in automotive, so we could root for each other. When our time came, there were two other nominees in our category: Travelocity and HomeAway.com. HomeAway was awarded gold, we won sliver and Travelocity's Roaming Gnome won bronze. Given that HomeAway's campaign featured Chevy Chase as 65-year-old Clark Griswold in a highly acclaimed Super Bowl ad, we were pretty stoked to get silver. This is Proper Effie Context Point #3: Effies are rarely awarded to destinations. While there is obviously a tourism category, the winners are typically, again, the big global brands. Online travel agents, hotel chains, cruise lines, that sort of thing. A destination had not won an Effie since 2007 and a domestic destination had not won since 2005. And those were bronze awards. Our Montana work is the first destination anywhere in the world to win a silver or gold since Jamaica — 11 years ago.

Montana's Effie Entry

At the end of the night, they awarded the Grand Effie — the prize for the campaign deemed best in show. Our new friends at David and Goliath were one of six nominees for this honor. Their work featured giant hamsters driving around in a Kia Soul. Rapping. Poking fun at competitive brands and generally mocking hamsters caught on a metaphorical hamster wheel of life. It is well done. Another favorite contender was the Snickers campaign with Betty White produced by BBDO. Neither won. The famed Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign from Wieden+Kennedy won just as it has won nearly every other award show from here to France. And this brings me to Proper Effie Context Point #4: The agency world, hell, the WORLD will have to undergo a complete revolution before we get nominated for a Grand Effie. Candy, deodorant, six foot hamsters. The whole marketing world is simply a lot of stuff. And stuff is not what we sell. The consumer we know doesn't want stuff. Sure, they spend money. Lots of it, or we wouldn't be in business. But they're searching for a different way. For experiences. And they either see through or don't engage at all with much of what our industry churns out.

This can be a bit of heresy when you are sitting in an advertising awards show in the center of New York City. Sometimes it feels like what we're trying to do is swim upstream in a flood. But then sometimes, you win an Effie. And you show up to accept it. Whatever that means.

Read the official press release here: http://j.mp/lwU2Or