The Gong Gong Awards Deserve a Better Archive

This year's Gong Gong Awards is set for July 25th. It's one of those things I didn't care about until last year, because of it's transition into irrelevance years prior. The one notable thing my CEO, Andrew Ackah will be remembered for as president of the AAG is resurrecting these awards that I'd only heard of but didn't really understand as a kid. I'm proud of him for that.

Am I excited by the awards this year? You bet. But I'm also annoyed and bothered. I'm annoyed because there's no easy way to see past winners and interact with their work. I'm bothered because my questioning of how sus marketing awards are organized and handed out, and the principle behind it has only intensified since last year. But we'll reserve my bother for another day.

Let's focus on my annoyance.

Finding last year's Gong Gong Awards winners is an exercise in patience and over reliance on AI tools. A human search, via Google and on the website sends you to this page which sends you to a PDF of the winners and a long photo gallery of the jury with no context on who they are or what they do (although this was done rather beautifully on their socials, just not on the evergreen website).

Further digging sends you to two other PDFs listing the entrants in some categories, and what is essentially a spreadsheet of all the final Gong Gong awards. A bloody spreadsheet!

ChatGPT thankfully came clutch with the rescue in my attempt to "fix" this by serving the only useful page, Winning Entries Portal - Advertising Association of Ghana.

At least the data is there now. But for a platform celebrating creativity in design, craft, media, strategy and all that marketing comms is great for, I am heartbroken.

Oh did I mention that there's also nothing about this year's jury on the website? It still lists last year's. Sigh.

Anywho, I decided to spin up Claude Code and Codex to see what could be done with it. I wrote the same prompts into CC's Fable 5 and ChatGPT's Sol. I liked Codex's visual direction better (OpenAI really outdid themselves with the UI in their latest model), and some of the features in CC.

Below is what's been built so far.

I like the general direction and might just pitch this to the AAG. Or not. I have asked Elikem Nordor, the Solutions Architect at dentsu (where I work) to build something out as well. He's our resident developer so I'm confident he'll come up with something miles better.