The American Advertising Federation recognized Wray Ward with a Gold national ADDY Award for the agency’s internal seminar series, Owwn Your Craft. This award, featured in the Advertising Industry Self-Promotion category, spotlighted Owwn Your Craft’s goal of energizing the team’s relentless drive to perfect their skill set, regardless of their discipline. The campaign won three gold awards in regional ADDY Awards earlier this year.

The campaign featured a series of seminars to energize Wray Ward’s creative team’s relentless drive to perfect their skill set, and hone in on creativity, technique and connection, regardless of their discipline — copywriting, design, art direction, video, UX or web development.

“When you closely examine something you’ve created — your art, your design, your words — you can discover the difference in the details and where you can improve. Over time, that commitment creates a pathway to doing your job as perfectly as possible. That’s owning your craft,” said Chief Creative Officer John Roberts. “We appreciate the national recognition from our peers in the industry and would bet that the sentiment behind the campaign resonates with them on a personal level, too.”

Through fostering open conversations and taking a more precise approach to exercises to improve technique, Owwn Your Craft became a lens for Wray Ward employees to enhance their skillsets, attention to detail and capability to create better-performing work.

“Owwn Your Craft is all about taking pride in what we do best, both individually and as a collective,” said President and Chief Executive Officer Kent Panther. “As an agency, we are focused on continuous improvement. Owwn Your Craft is a great example of this commitment and continues the ensure that we deliver better-performing work for ourselves and for our clients.”

Held in June and organized annually by the American Advertising Federation, the ADDYs mark the industry’s largest competition, aiming to recognize and reward the creative spirit of excellence in the art of advertising.