Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice and their ilk need not apply – Young Glory is no place for one-hit wonders. The new international creativity competition co-founded by a Canadian creative is being billed as the first to reward consistency.
Rafik Belmesk
The eight-month competition invites participants to create work for briefs set by eight industry “giants,” including Gav Gordon-Rogers, former executive creative director at Agency Republic and current creative director at LBi Edinburgh, and Graham Kelly, national executive creative director at OgilvyOne India.
Co-created by Rafik Belmesk, a strategic planner with Montreal agency LG2, and Brendan Graham, a copywriter and “strategy guy” at the Australian agency Soap Creative, Young Glory is a global competition open to students and ad professionals under the age of 30.
Participants in two categories – Student and Professional – are scored for work produced for each brief, with the cumulative total determining the winner in each category. The competition will also award School of the Year and Network of the Year honours based on the combined point totals.
“They say in business that anybody can have a good idea, but if you want to be called a real creative professional, you’ve got to have good ideas all the time,” said Belmesk. “Young Glory is a competition that rewards consistency.”
The team of Duncan Mungee and Shahak Shapira, graduates of the Miami Ad School in Hamburg and now employed at McCann in the UK and Germany’s Jung Von Matt respectively, are currently leading the Student competition with 78 points, while Alan Jones, a freelancer based in Auckland, is the runaway leader in the Professional category with 81 points – 23 points ahead of the second place team.
The highest ranked Canadian team is Team Paperboys, consisting of Xavier Blais from BOS Montreal and Jeff Lee from Sid Lee. They are currently ranked ninth in the Professionals category with 35 points.
Belmesk said the overall calibre of the entries has been good. “We’ve got some top judges, and everybody’s been impressed by the quality of the work,” he said.
Belmesk also characterized most of the winning work as “discipline neutral,” meaning that it moves beyond traditional TV, print or even online advertising to encompass everything from packaging to distribution to product innovation.
The winning work shows a potential way forward for the marketing/advertising function, said Belmesk. “[Agencies] are trying to have a bigger impact on their clients’ brands than just a 30-second commercial,” he said.
Marc Fortin, senior partner and vice-president, executive creative director at LG2, has set the seventh brief in the competition for a new venture from Just for Laughs and Live Nation called JFL42.
“People need to laugh, so it’s a brief that everybody in the world can relate to,” said Belmesk. “There are a lot of interesting parallels between our two industries, so I’m looking forward to what people come up with.”
Previous briefs have included the Aakash (Sky) tablet device, which is aimed helping Indian students in small towns and villages bridge the digital divide; helping the Occupy Movement benefit from marketing, and encouraging people to make regular donations to Wikipedia.
