Three standout AIMIA award winners

Freelancer.com, Dr. Cotton and 5X Mutant Gum are among the winners of this year’s Australian Interactive Media Industry Association awards, suggesting start-ups can learn from their success.

The awards celebrate the best work of Australia’s digital content, services and applications industry across a range of consumer, business, government and not-for-profit categories.

“Right now… we are producing the same amount of data per day as all books ever written and words ever spoken in our entire prior history,” AIMIA president Simon Goodrich says.

“The role of what we do with this, including rights and privacy online, will become an ever more public issue, and we as an industry should be active in these debates.”

“In Australia, we are great at digging things out of the ground. But globally, we can make our footprint larger by leveraging our digital skills.”

There were 25 award winners this year, including the ABC, Fairfax Digital, Viocorp, MercerBell and SBS. StartupSmart picked out three of the lesser-known standouts:

1. 5X Mutant Gum, Soap Creative

Best Advertising or Marketing

Best Integration with an Offline Campaign

Based in Sydney, Soap Creative is a web design studio, specialising in Flash games, applications and promotional sites.

Soap Creative worked with Wrigley’s to launch a cross-promotion between their latest product, 5 Gum, and the film X-Men: First Class, introducing a specially created flavor called “Mutant”.

At 5XMutantGum.com, users create an alter ego and battle other mutants. Meanwhile, every pack of 5X contains a unique code that can be used to unlock more mutant powers.

The campaign was a huge success. 5X drove 5 Gum to its best ever market share in Australia. 5X was also the second best-selling gum across Australia in June 2011.

Based on the success of the campaign, 5X will return to market in 2013 to surround the next X-Men movie.

2. Dr. Cotton website, Evolution 7

Best Retail or Online Commerce

Evolution 7 is a digital agency providing web design, development and strategy. Based in Melbourne, Evolution 7 came up with the concept for the Dr. Cotton website.

Dr. Cotton is a Melbourne-based screen printer and streetwear label, specialising in locally and ethically designed custom T-shirts.

The website has a pick ‘n’ click functionality that allows users total control over theme, colour, fit, logos and other custom options. It also offers hints to make the process as simple as possible.

“Complete your order preferences, upload/email your own logo or emblem that you want Dr. Cotton to include and we will send back your updated concept for approval soon after,” it says.

“You will even get a link that you can share so other people can view it before it’s even printed.”

3. Freelancer.com

People’s Choice

Based in NSW and led by tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, Freelancer.com describes itself as the world’s largest outsourcing marketplace for small business.

“We connect over 3,271,471 employers and freelancers globally from over 234 countries and regions,” it says.

“Through our website, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering and the sciences, sales and marketing, and accounting and legal services.”

Earlier this month, it launched the Freelancer.com Interactive Scavenger Hunt at SXSW, with teams vying for $50,000 in prizes, in “the biggest scavenger hunt ever done online”.

The competition is expected to attract more than 6,000 participants, setting a Guinness World Record for largest internet scavenger hunt.