Meet the New Stars and Young Stars of AD STARS 2020

AD STARS has announced this year’s New Stars and Young Stars winners who will collect Gold, Silver, Bronze and Crystal awards at AD STARS 2020. The AD STARS 2020 awards showcase and free online festival launch tomorrow, 22nd October, via the website.

New Stars is a career development program for junior advertising professionals with under 5 years of professional experience; while the Young Stars program is open to university students.

There were 208 New Stars entries from 378 people in 26 countries this year. This year’s New Stars winners are:

GOLD – Wilson Ariyaduta, Bujukrayu, Indonesia

SILVER – Aiken Hutcheson and Stan Lee, DDB New Zealand

BRONZE – Chinny Basinang and Haniel Esteban, MullenLowe Philippines

CRYSTAL – RJ Espartinez and Ronela Lopez, VMLY&R Philippines; and Emily Jo Chen Siew Lyn and Fatin Nabilah Binti Harun, Ensemble Worldwide, Malaysia

Linus Oura, creative director at GUT in São Paulo, Brazil, was on the New Stars 2020 jury. He says: “I was really surprised by how insightful and culturally relevant some of the ideas presented were. They also made use of technology in a smart way. It's really important to support this kind of competition so we can nurture the talent of the future of advertising, empowering them to create and show the world that great ideas are global and can be applied anywhere.”

There were 193 Young Stars entries from 495 students in 18 countries this year. This year’s Young Stars winners are:

GOLD – Yufei Wang and Tianshu Du from Renmin University of China

SILVER – Cheung Chi Ho from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

BRONZE – Chae young Hwang, YeI Woo and Minji Kim from Dongseo University, South Korea; Haeji Shin, Bokyung Kim, Subin Im and Daeyeop Kim from Dongseo University, South Korea

CRYSTAL – Sumin Hong (Incheon National University), Seonghoon Jeong (Chung-ang University), Seohyun Hwang (Kyunghee University) and Seyeop Jung (University College Dublin), South Korea; Lee HyeonSeong, Yeon Woo Kim, Ye Ji Nam and Yeon Jeong Kim from Hongik University, South Korea; and Jueun Lee, Hyerim Noh and Gieun Oh from Dong-A University, South Korea.

Senior creative manager, BBDO Pakistan, Fatima Ansari, who helped to judge the Young Stars program, said: “I was thoroughly impressed by the standard of entries. The clear strategic thought process behind each piece – especially the newness in how the teams had envisioned their ideas – is what stood out for me. There were countless new mediums being discovered with zero care about conventional restrictions. It goes to show how important it is to equip young talent with resources to bring something challenging, fresh and ground breaking to light!”

Lulu Lu, executive creative director at Wunderman Thompson Taipei, added: “This year's entries are very wonderful and very thoughtful, but the winners stood out because the creative ideas are clear and their intentions are clear. This year’s teams are not only interested in creative ideas but also interested in strategy, so I feel very happy, because strategy is the most important thing before the creative idea.”

For the first time, Gold-winning New Stars and Young Stars teams receive KRW 5,000,000 (approx. US$4,000). The Gold-winning New Stars team also wins a free ticket to attend AD STARS 2021, while Young Stars winners may be offered internships at Oricom, Innored, Overman, Cheil Worldwide, TBWA KOREA, HS Ad and Blue Focus Digital.

Usually, all New Stars and Young Stars teams meet in Busan, South Korea, but this year’s participants came together virtually to crack the following ‘brief’: to suggest campaign idea/s to drive recognition of home meal replacement brand ‘Mitus’, which is a private brand owned by NS Home Shopping.

The AD STARS 2020 awards showcase launches tomorrow on 22nd October, while this year’s AD STARS festival will take place online from October 22nd – 23rd. All sessions are free to watch here.