Young Lotus Nurtures New Talent

30 young creatives from 15 markets across Asia Pacific spent two and half days in lockdown last week (a challenge in itself in Pattaya!) as they competed in this year’s Young Lotus Creative competition at AdFest.

 

Teams from Auckland, Bangkok, Beijing, Colombo, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, and Tokyo joined this year’s workshop. It provided a great opportunity for the participants to share their experiences and learn about the industry’s diverse landscape across the region.

 

Our programme explored the truth about what it takes to be a creative today and challenged our participants to redefine the communications of tomorrow. We’re fortunate to work in an industry that brings together talent and expertise from across the business landscape. Our speakers embodied the heart of any successful agency – the collaboration between creatives, suits and planners. We even brought in the talent guy to help our young teams build their own personal brands. 

 

With sessions discussing storytelling, partnerships, effectiveness, creating innovative solutions (big, sexy clients aren’t required to create great work), and tomorrow’s trends, our young teams were consistently challenged to re-think, re-create and re-imagine the problem. To inject their imagination and passion into briefs to create new, engaging stories.

 

 

The truth about being a creative today is that most briefs agencies receive are not exciting. Most briefs are very, very ordinary. So we challenged the young teams to apply their learnings to a boring, everyday brief – make a recruitment ad to seek creative talent for McCann.

 

We wanted to see how far they could take the brief, how big they could make their work. We asked them to share a solution which: awakened their clients and transformed an everyday brief into something special and unique; is interesting, meaningful and impactful; goes above and beyond what clients expect in terms of creativity and results.

 

With just 24 hours to deliver the brief, president of AdFest, Jimmy Lam, told the young creatives that they would ‘come here busy-eyed and leave bruised and tender’.

 

After having only an hour or two of sleep, we think all of the participants agreed. But our teams delivered 15 very exciting and diverse ideas that challenged the status quo and demonstrated ingenuity and engagingness.

 

Watch the judges’ impressions here. 

 

The judges were very impressed by all of the teams and had a difficult time choosing three finalists. Eventually Team Auckland (Matthew Williams and Frederick Coltart), Team Kuala Lumpur, (Li Peng Cheok and Mohammed Khairul Anuar Bin Mohammed Jusoh), and Team Tokyo (Yuko Hatakeyama and Yuka Shibata), stood out for their highly original thinking, turning our ordinary brief into an extraordinary execution.

 

After a day’s rest, the three finalists were back on stage, this time presenting at AdFest. They were hoping to capture the imagination of the festival audience who were voting to name the people’s choice award, in addition to the winners chosen by the McCann judges.

 

At last night’s award show, the 2013 Young Lotus winners were finally announced - Team Malaysia crowned both the Winners and Popular Choice Winners. Huge congratulations to Li Peng Cheok and Mohd Khairul Anuar on their amazing campaign, ‘The Real Daydream Nation’.

 

Team Malaysia’s winning entry: