With a whopping 165 teams entered this year, the Globe and Mail today announced the results of the 2011 Canadian Young Lions competition. Each of the four Gold-winning teams earns a trip to the official Cannes Young Lions competition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Each team was asked to create a campaign for client The Stephen Lewis Foundation, a charitable foundation that seeks to address the challenges of AIDS and HIV in Africa. The target demographic was women 25 to 45 and the goal was to increase donations to the charity, while establishing the unique nature of SLF, which is that they work with local organizations, funding their grassroots education and assistance projects.
This year’s Globe Young Lions Gold Film winners are Grey Canada copywriter Amy Jacobs and art director Liz Donnelly. The PSA focused on a young woman, speaking in an African dialect, sans subtitles. The copy stated: ‘If we can’t understand what she’s saying, how can we understand what she needs?’ It went on to explain, ‘Help us stem the tide of AIDS in Africa. Your donations will go to local organizations that understaind where funds are needed most.’ The jury, chaired by strategy exec editor Mary Maddever, praised the spot for its simplicity and for being on brief.
The Globe Young Lions Gold for Print went to a DDB Toronto duo, Rebecca May, junior art director, and Domenique Raso, junior copywriter. Their execution, which used overlapping symbols representing women coming together, also contains the SLF logo image. The jury felt the clean art direction and simple idea perfectly encapsulated a focus of the charity, which is helping the women who are left behind, and was deemed to transcend any language barriers.
Alex Newman, designer, BBDO Proximity and Patrice Pollack, a writer with Argyle Magazine, are the Globe Young Lions Gold Cyber winners. Their online ads are a compelling call to action, with the scrolling numbers and names of victims affected by AIDS being dramatically reversed by a click to engage with the ad, which then indicates the number and names of ‘young women who will not become victims’ as the user becomes ‘1 agent of change.’
The Gold in the media category goes to Peter Mak, digital strategist, and Nykolai Hrytsyk, assistant strategist, of Starcom, whose multi-tiered media plan urged women to think about what it would be like to lose someone they loved. Innovative approaches through social media (‘How would you feel if we removed these [friends] from your Facebook?’), mobile and traditional media won the hearts of the judging panel.
Media Experts CEO Lauren Richards, who moderated the nine-person media jury, says ‘We have such amazing and talented young people in our business and they again showed a keen interest in developing and learning, evidenced by their sheer participation alone. Entrants were up 15% this year, which is absolutely fantastic. We can grow it so much further though – I honestly can’t understand why every media person under 29 isn’t participating. If you don’t want to learn, be inspired and have a chance to win a life-changing trip to Cannes, why be in the business?
‘There were great ideas throughout all the entries, but at the end of the day, we selected by connectivity of the ideation to the strategic proposition of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the connectivity of the ideas and innovations to each other, the answers to the complete brief – which was a little more daunting this year – and the way the teams brought their thinking to life.’
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