Content creation duo Blok and Dino took home a plethora of awards at the recently concluded SLIM DIGIS 2.0 held on 21 January. They were presented with a Gold for “Punchi Dupathe Kathawa”, two Silvers for “Amma Wars” (PickMe Food) and “Office Hora Police” (Lipton Ceylonta), as well as a Special Bronze Award for Best Branded Content for “Rapshoplanthe” (Laugfs Super). The duo also bagged two finalist certificates, walking away with six awards to their name.
The SLIM DIGIS 2.0 is an award ceremony hosted by the Sri Lanka Institute of Management (SLIM), the national body in marketing in Sri Lanka. The SLIM DIGIS was first introduced in 2018 as a means to celebrate ingenuity and innovation in the field of digital marketing for Sri Lankan companies with campaigns both within and outside of the country. The most reputed and coveted digital awards ceremony in the country, SLIM DIGIS 2.0 recognised achievements across multiple sectors including tourism, telecommunication, hospitality, and lifestyle. Last year, at the inaugural awards, Blok and Dino received two Golds for “How to Balance Your Baba” (Seylan Bank), the first being in the Banking and Finance category and the other being a jury-selected Gold for best branded content.
Gehan Blok and Dino Corera are actors, writers, directors, and producers with almost two decades of combined professional experience in journalism, broadcast, and digital media. Blok and Dino are a small dedicated team that passionately produce award-winning handcrafted content. Their goal is to help clients craft engaging brand stories and digital experiences that communicate clearly, achieve marketing goals, and push the boundaries.
Speaking to The Morning Brunch, Gehan Blok expressed his sentiments regarding their achievement. “It’s a great feeling. We are a very small organisation with us being the only two employees.” He also added that they do not have an office, and still operate from home. Whilst most of their production work is outsourced, the core creative work, in terms of conceptualisation, writing, and editing, is all them.
Sharing his gratitude for the awards ceremony, he said: “We don’t really have a nine to five schedule, ideation is a strange process; sometimes you can crack a great concept in a few minutes but there are times we end up working quite late into the night. It’s great to see all our hard work, late nights, and sacrifices being recognised.”
The submission process for these awards is not simple; Blok explained that they had to condense their objectives, creative, and results into a five to seven-minute video per submission along with a document of all analytics and business results associated with the campaign. The entries made were reviewed by a reputed panel of judges, and evaluated in two rounds.
The video that won the Gold award, “Punchi Dupathe Kathahwa”, was released just 10 days after the devastating 21 April 2019 Easter Sunday attacks. The narrative of the script, written by Blok and Dino, encouraged people not to let this event swing into a full-blown ethnic conflict that may result in another decades-long war. The story was incredibly touching, and it’s no surprise that this particular video won.
Sharing their plans for the future, Blok commented that they want to be more innovative with their concepts and grow their clientele. “We work very hard for both our clients and audience. We aim to keep our audience entertained with everything we produce while ensuring all content is in line with the partner brand’s marketing objectives.”
