So all week I have been moderating the juries and talking through the decisions behind the awards of the Bronze, Silver & Gold winning work in each Young Lions Competition at Cannes, and opening the session up for Q&A from our competing teams. This is the first in a series of blogs where I’ll share the brief that each competition was working on (they were all bar one not for profit briefs), a summary of the winning work and insights from the jury.
First up the Young Lions Print Competition, where teams worked on a brief for the Creative Spirit organisation.
At its core, Creative Spirit’s mission is to connect individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) to the most influential companies in the world, in order to secure genuinely integrated employment opportunities that culturally and creatively enrich both parties
The brief in a nutshell was to create a print ad which will attract individuals with IDD to apply for jobs in the creative industry via Creative Spirit. The organisation wants work to help them to create a movement and a shift in attitude: individuals with disabilities belong in the workplace alongside their typical peers. The organization’s tagline is:
“After all, what’s more creative than being different?”
There were 72 people in total who competed for the prize, working in creative pairs. The full brief is here. Creative Spirit Young Lions Print Brief
The two jurors who took the time to share their insights with the competitors were Sergio Pollaccia, CEO of Amen Argentina and Polina Maguire, Creative Director, Havas, pictured here.
The winning work was awarded to the country teams as follows:
- Gold – Germany
- Silver – Canada
- Bronze – Netherlands
I wasn’t given the names of the winning teams when we debriefed the work (and the jurors deliberately didn’t want to know which agencies they were from to avoid bias to their own networks) so I don’t have them as yet, but I will populate here as soon as I have them to give them their proper dues! Here is the winning Young Lions Print Competition work:
Gold
Silver
Bronze
As you can see the winning entry was a ‘no holds barred’ approach to the challenge tackling the issue head-on with their provocative language juxtaposed with the image, then challenging the stereotypes in the copy. This bold approach obviously won the hearts and minds of the judges to take gold. The silver winners took everyday work issues and played around with the copy to make the ‘all may abilities’ line stand out in their execution. The bronze place winner played around with what the judges called the ‘Ying and Yang’ of the problem in their execution cleverly showing both sides of the issue, and the solution using the faded out text.
Congratulations to the winners and everyone who made it to the competition from their country rounds! How would you have tackled the brief? In the next blog we review the Young Lions Marketers entries and winners.
We review creative campaigns and work, and dissect what takes it from good to great in our Creative Ninja workshops.