Young Lions Winners Announced

Asatsu-DK Japan has won the prestigious Young Lions PR Competition for creative talent at the 61st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – sponsored by Getty Images for the 17th consecutive year.

On Manday (16 June) the jury selected Weber Shandwick UK to take second place, with third place awarded to Ketchum Publico Austria.

The Young Lions Competition is designed to catapult the careers of rising stars that are set to redefine the future use of imagery in advertising. The winning team members are Tetsuya Umeda, (interactive planner) and Yuichiro Okada (account executive) from Asatsu-DK Japan.

Commenting on their win, the ecstatic team from Japan said: “We are very pleased to get this honour. It’s actually our first time here in Cannes and winning gold – we didn’t really expect that… Most people won’t be familiar with Japanese creative and work so it’s our mission to bring out this message that we have special talent in our country to share with the world.”

This year’s brief was set by UNODC, a charity leading the fight against illicit drugs and international crime. The charity disclosed a brief to create a PR campaign that would raise awareness of the Blue Heart Campaign around International Human Trafficking Day and increase contributions from the public towards victim support.

The sixteen competing teams had just 24 hours to interpret the brief and develop PR creative, using content sourced from Getty Images’ range of creative, editorial and archival collections – including iStock by Getty Images.

The work was scrutinised by the jury members, headed up by this year’s Cannes Lions jury president, Renee Wilson. Congratulating the winning team this year, jury member Pascal Beucler said: “Asatsu-DK came with an incredible idea, “what is the most precious thing we have in life apart from a newborn baby” and created this incredible image which we believe could be turned into a campaign and would be a worldwide success.”

Winners received an iStock by Getty Images subscription, a new service aimed at bringing greater simplicity and value to high volume content users, through a licensing model that offers vast use of photos and illustrations available on iStock.

Top photo credit (L-R): Weber Shandwick UK, Asatsu-DK Japan, Ketchum Publico Austria.