How Moroch Turned the AAF ADDY Awards Into a Fantasy Sports League
Moroch created Fantasy Advertising, a digital campaign for the AAF ADDY Awards, published in the United States in April 2016, which applied the mechanics of fantasy sports leagues to advertising-awards culture, inviting agencies to draft advertising professionals as team members and accumulate points based on live award-show results.
The campaign was developed to promote participation in the 54th annual AAF Dallas American Advertising Awards, held on February 18, 2016, at Gas Monkey Live in Dallas, according to coverage published by adchatdfw.com. Rather than position the ADDY Awards through conventional prestige messaging, Moroch reframed the event as a competitive sport, translating the insider vocabulary of creative competition — creative directors, copywriters, art directors — into the familiar language of fantasy league drafting. Agencies assembled teams by selecting advertising professionals from competing shops, with those teams then accumulating points as the individuals they had drafted won awards across the evening's judging. A live leaderboard tracked standings throughout the event, sustaining competitive tension in real time.
In the United States, the ADDY Awards represent one of the advertising industry's most broadly participatory recognition programmes, drawing entries from regional markets nationwide before culminating at the national AAF level. By framing entry into the awards as an act of team-building rather than individual submission, Moroch shifted the psychological register of the campaign from self-promotion to collective sport. The single media asset at the centre of this digital campaign was supported by a related teaser video published in December 2015, which featured Moroch's Kevin Sutton and The Richards Group's Chris Smith directing agencies toward the fantasy-team concept, according to records documented by clapboard.com. The campaign sits within the Professional Services category and represents a creative reframing of an awards brand through the sustained application of fantasy-sports language and structure.
Moroch identified a structural insight at the centre of advertising awards culture. The ADDY Awards, like all industry recognition programmes, depend on sustained agency participation — entries, attendance, advocacy — yet the conventional messaging used to solicit that participation rarely speaks to advertising professionals in terms they find genuinely compelling. By 2016, the awards-entry proposition had become familiar enough that it risked feeling obligatory rather than exciting.
The fantasy sports analogy solved this problem by translating a known behaviour — the annual ritual of drafting fantasy teams, monitoring leaderboards, and competing with peers — into the awards context. Advertising professionals in the United States were already fluent in fantasy league culture, and that fluency became the campaign's primary strategic asset. The Richards Group, one of Dallas's most prominent independent agencies and a natural competitor in the AAF Dallas market, was visibly involved in the teaser phase of the campaign, with The Richards Group's Chris Smith appearing alongside Moroch's Kevin Sutton in December 2015 video content, as documented by clapboard.com. This cross-agency involvement reinforced the campaign's premise: that the ADDY Awards belonged to the whole creative community, not any single shop.
The broader US advertising market in 2016 provided a receptive environment for digital-first, engagement-led campaigns of this kind. According to dentsu.com, digital advertising spend was growing significantly across the United States that year, with video and social formats seeing particularly strong momentum. Within professional services advertising, standing out required moving beyond announcement-style communications. Moroch's decision to build participation mechanics directly into the campaign — drafting, scoring, live leaderboard competition — meant that engagement was not an aspiration but a structural feature of the work itself. Leo Burnett and other large network agencies operating award-recognition campaigns in the US market at the time relied more heavily on film craft and emotional storytelling; Moroch's approach distinguished itself through interactive gamification rather than narrative.
Rob Pritts directed the Fantasy Advertising campaign, with production handled by Lucky 21, the Dallas-based production company, according to credits documented by clapboard.com. The post-production was shared between Side Chops and Lucky Post, with voice talent provided by Greg Sunmark — a casting choice that reinforced the sports-broadcast register the campaign sought to inhabit throughout its creative execution.
Executive creative director Kevin Sutton led the creative team at Moroch, with David Soames and Dustin Taylor serving as creative directors. Soames and Taylor also contributed copywriting alongside Ben Rucker, while art direction and design were handled by Ryan Everett and Terry Ranson. The production was managed by senior project managers Leticia Taylor and Sally Smolenski, with development work by Nathan Gathright and Jon Hunter. Broadcast production was overseen by Kathleen Torres, with John Gilliland serving as producer — a full-service creative and production infrastructure that reflects the scale of commitment Moroch applied to what was, at its core, a campaign for a regional awards event.
The creative execution translated fantasy sports aesthetics — the vocabulary of drafts, rosters, points, and standings — into an advertising-industry context with enough specificity to feel genuinely earned rather than borrowed. The live leaderboard element required functional development work beyond conventional campaign production, blending interactive and broadcast craft disciplines within a single-asset digital campaign. The December 2015 teaser video, featuring on-camera industry figures from Moroch and The Richards Group, adopted a tone closer to sports-preview programming than traditional awards promotion, according to clapboard.com. That tonal choice ran consistently through the campaign's creative language, ensuring that the fantasy sports conceit was not merely a metaphor applied at the surface level but a structuring principle that shaped production decisions at every stage.
No verified performance data for the Fantasy Advertising campaign is publicly available. Moroch did not release figures relating to entry volumes, event attendance, leaderboard participation, or digital reach in connection with the April 2016 campaign, and no third-party measurement source has published independently verified metrics for this work.
Structural analysis, however, supports a credible case for effectiveness. The campaign's core mechanic — building a fantasy team by entering work in the ADDY Awards — created a direct and functional link between engagement with the campaign and participation in the awards programme itself. Entry was not incidental to the experience; it was the entry point to competition. This is a structurally efficient design for a participation-driving campaign, because the desired behaviour and the rewarding behaviour are identical. The live leaderboard at the Gas Monkey Live event, documented by adchatdfw.com, provided a real-time social experience that sustained in-room engagement and created shareable competitive moments among attending agency professionals.
The campaign's reach was further extended by its cross-agency creative involvement, with figures from both Moroch and The Richards Group appearing in promotional content, lending the work credibility across the Dallas advertising community it sought to mobilise. The decision to deliver the campaign through a digital medium was consistent with the direction of US advertising investment in 2016, where digital formats were capturing a growing share of total spend, according to dentsu.com. The Fantasy Advertising campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100, reflecting a genuinely original strategic concept and a fully realised production, offset by the absence of verifiable performance data and the inherently limited geographic scope of a regionally focused awards-promotion campaign.
Fantasy Advertising was a digital campaign created by Moroch for the AAF ADDY Awards, published in the United States in April 2016. It applied fantasy sports league mechanics — drafting, rosters, and live leaderboard scoring — to advertising awards culture, turning agency entry into a competitive team sport among Dallas advertising professionals.
Kevin Sutton served as executive creative director. Creative directors David Soames and Dustin Taylor led the concept, with copywriting also contributed by Ben Rucker. Art direction was handled by Ryan Everett and Terry Ranson. Director Rob Pritts led production through Lucky 21, with post-production completed by Side Chops and Lucky Post.
Agencies drafted advertising professionals — creative directors, copywriters, art directors — from competing shops to form fantasy teams. Those teams accumulated points as drafted individuals won awards during the 54th annual AAF Dallas American Advertising Awards on February 18, 2016, at Gas Monkey Live, with standings tracked on a live leaderboard throughout the event, according to adchatdfw.com.
Fantasy Advertising received a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's original strategic concept and fully realised production craft, balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance data and the regionally focused scope of an awards-promotion campaign within the United States advertising market.
The Richards Group participated in the campaign's teaser phase. The Richards Group's Chris Smith appeared alongside Moroch's Kevin Sutton in a December 2015 teaser video directing agencies toward the fantasy-team concept, according to clapboard.com. This cross-agency involvement reinforced the campaign's premise that the ADDY Awards belonged to the broader Dallas creative community.
Moroch identified that conventional awards-promotion messaging risked feeling obligatory to advertising professionals already familiar with the ADDY Awards. Fantasy sports culture offered a shared language — drafting, competition, live scoring — that reframed participation as genuinely compelling. The format made entry into the awards the direct mechanism for joining the competition, linking desired and rewarding behaviours structurally.
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