Chiat / Day Tops Regional Ad Awards : Contests: Judges found Southland agencies’ car commercials, a local specialty, lacking in originality.

Chiat/Day Inc. emerged as the biggest winner Wednesday in the Los Angeles Advertising Club’s annual competition for best locally produced ads, with the agency’s quirky series of TV commercials for Sunkist pistachio nuts taking top honors.

Auto advertising, a local specialty, was all but ignored by the judges, who said the lavishly produced ads lacked originality.

Chiat/Day won six awards, making it the most honored agency in the annual Belding awards, given for ads produced last year by agency offices in Southern California. In all, 26 Belding prizes were awarded at a glitzy affair at the Century Plaza Hotel.

The Beldings are often likened to the Oscars in the Los Angeles advertising industry, particularly because the two events occur at about the same time each year. The annual contest is viewed as a gauge of the region’s creative talents. A panel of advertising executives from outside Los Angeles select winning ads based on clarity and inventiveness.

The winning commercials by Chiat/Day play on the word nut while exploiting California’s reputation for wacky behavior. One ad shows a woman playing a xylophone by shooting Ping-Pong balls from her mouth. The picture fades to display the slogan “Everybody knows the best nuts come from California.”

However, despite some much-lauded work, the region’s agencies came up short when it came to auto advertising. Judges honored no TV car commercial, an embarrassment for a city that produces so much car advertising it is known as “Detroit on the beach.” Advertising for Acura, Honda, Lexus, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota is produced by Los Angeles agencies.

The only car ad to win a Belding was a magazine pitch for the Nissan Pathfinder by Chiat/Day.

In interviews, Belding judges said auto commercials, particularly those for luxury cars, were numbingly similar.

“It was fascinating to watch on the whole. Every ad was virtually the same,” said judge Bob Brihn, an art director with the Minneapolis agency of Carmichael Lynch Inc. “The same melodic music, the same pseudo-British accent voice-over, the cliche shot at the end with leaves flying and the car picking a corner.”

Judge Jim Garaventi, an associate creative director with Ingalls Quinn & Johnson in Boston, said the auto commercials, when viewed individually, were well scripted and produced. But “when you watch them back-to-back, you realize they all blend together,” he said. “Every spot seems to talk about status, the leather and the interior.”

The judges praised the pistachio ads, which were initially controversial within the company that markets the nuts under a licensing agreement with Sunkist.

Executives at Bakersfield-based Paramount Farms debated whether the commercials promulgated the stereotype that “Californians are off-the-wall,” said the company’s marketing director, Bradford Knickerbocher. Besides the Ping-Pong lady, the ads show a man professing to communicate with aliens and another clumsily belting meditative, monosyllabic chants.

Eventually, Paramount executives concluded that while the ads ribbed Californians, they were not offensive. Knickerbocher said the company has received few complaints about the commercials, which aired last fall.

“Nowadays, you have to do something different to break through all the advertising there is on TV,” he said.

“This is a case of a brave client who was willing to take the chance to do something a little more unique and different,” said Bob Kuperman, a managing director at Chiat/Day. The agency, which often dominated the Belding awards in the 1980s, is in the process of merging with New York-based TBWA International.

Also honored was a Pioneer Electronics car stereo campaign by BBDO West. The TV commercial opens with black-and-white newsreel footage of Galloping Gertie, a swaying bridge in Tacoma, Wash. The motion stops when a driver turns off his car stereo, muttering, “Sorry.”

Though BBDO won the award for the spot, one of five Beldings for that agency, the Pioneer ad was created for BBDO on a free-lance basis by two owners of Ground Zero, a year-old Venice agency also competing in the Beldings.

Court Crandall, creative director at Ground Zero, said the agency did free-lance work when it was getting started. It won three Beldings for work under its own name, including one for a TV spot for the Jody Maroni chain of sausage shops.