On the evening of 9 June, we at ReputeUs Social Media took our seats at Zorlu Center PSM to watch the Kırmızı Best Press Awards. Now in its 11th year, the Kırmızı Awards judge the best press advertisements across a wide range of categories. Social media posts on the subject used the hashtag #kırmızı11.

By the time we arrived, the pre-event cocktail reception was already over, so we headed straight into the hall. In Zorlu Center PSM's stunning, futuristic auditorium, the acoustics, décor and layout were genuinely excellent. The room was full of young advertising professionals waiting expectantly, and the ceremony opened with Ebru Akel as host.

As the name suggests, the Kırmızı Best Press Advertising Awards is a competition judging press ads, but advertising is a joined-up discipline now, and it's no longer really possible to separate social media engagement from a press ad. That's why Kırmızı 11 decided to award five further categories tied to social media — which, frankly, confirmed to us as social media people that being there was exactly the right call.

The Kırmızı Awards actually run across two main categories: Kırmızı Istanbul and Kırmızı Region. Istanbul agencies are judged separately from the rest of Turkey. There are two ways to look at this — let's start with the positive:

Istanbul is the centre of advertising in Turkey. The big work gets done in Istanbul, and the whole country's advertising industry effectively runs through Istanbul-based agencies. So giving Istanbul a special place in the awards matters for the sector's progress.

But let's not skip the negative either: a divide like Istanbul-versus-region in advertising can feel discouraging for "those in the region." In the end, good work comes from a creative, talented agency, and location matters less than it used to — especially with communications technology as advanced as it is today.

Naturally, our eyes stayed fixed on the screen for the whole ceremony, watching "what have they done here?" Outside the illustration awards, the winning work mostly seemed to shout "happiness is simplicity." A beautifully shot, quite possibly entirely unedited photograph, plain typography, plain copy. As the writer of these lines is a copywriter herself, of course the one she studied most closely was Best Press Content — an Edith Piaf biography that made its point with total clarity, no flowery sentences, never stepping ahead of the visual but never lagging behind it either. Genuinely excellent.

As with any competition, agencies whose work won a certificate of merit or a Kırmızı reflected their excitement in every moment of the ceremony. And, as ever, some stormed out of the hall in a huff after picking up several awards but missing out on the top Kıpkırmızı prize.

Luckily there was a lovely cocktail reception outside, and since we weren't competing on Kırmızı Awards night, we may well have enjoyed the evening more than anyone!

We were there, and we'll keep being wherever advertising is.