Sunday, January 31, 2010







Cannes Lions official representatives in Nigeria, Chini Productions have announced the opening of entries from February 1, 2009 for the Nigeria qualifying competitions for Young Lions Film Competition, Young Lions Cyber Competition, Young Lions Media Competition, Young Lions Marketers Competition and the Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy also known as Cannes Academy. The winners from each category will represent Nigeria at the international competition in France during the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival from 20th – 26th June.

To enter for the Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy, applicants should send email to entry@chiniproductions.com including their full name, date of birth, department, school, phone number (preferably GSM), and contact address. The Young Lions Competitions are available to teams who must be sponsored by their organisations. The application must be done on behalf of the teams by their company. However, there is no limit to the number of teams a particular organisation can send. To request for entry forms for the Young Lions Competitions, email should be sent to office@chiniproductions.com specifying the category of Young Lions Competitions. Entries for all the categories will close on March 24, 2010. All participants should have been contacted by March 31, 2010 with details of their participation. The competitions in Nigeria will take place in Lagos between the 6th and 10th of April 2010.
The Young Lions Marketers Competition is a new introduction worldwide. The goal of the Nigeria event is to select a team of two Young Marketers from a client organisation aged 30 years or under (born on or after 26 June 1980) who will represent Nigeria at the international finals in France during the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The Young Marketers Competition will require each team to have strong knowledge of their organisation’s products and brand objectives. Each team is expected to produce a Brief (maximum two pages) that will be presented to an advertising agency. For the purposes of the competition, the advertising agency will be represented by a select jury of Creatives and Strategists. Each team will also be required to give a maximum of 5 minutes presentation to the jury using Apple’s Keynote software. A maximum of 8 slides will be allowed (title slide optional – must form part of 8 slides). The jury will have a maximum of 5 minutes to ask questions immediately after the presentation.

The Young Lions Cyber Competition provides the opportunity for the new breed of cyber creatives to compete against each other. The internet has added new advertising options for today’s advertisers and the Young Lions Cyber Competition is an ideal opportunity for the best of the world’s young cyber creatives to showcase their talents. A series of training sessions will be handled in Cannes by Apple, Adobe and Getty Images. The brief will be presented by the client who must be a charity or public service organisation, whose identity is kept secret until the briefing begins when their name, objectives, strategies and target audience are revealed by a senior member of the charity. Participants in the Young Lions Cyber Competition must not be more than 28 years.

The Young Lions Media Competition challenges the brightest professional minds to demonstrate their strategic thinking and innovative approaches to solving an important marketing challenge to drive critical business success. Each team, made up of two participants, will be required to develop a media plan from a supplied brief for a charity organization within 24 hours and present in 5 minutes to a media jury, using specified software. In 2009, the team of Theresa Ogah and Dozie Okafor of MediaReach OMD represented Nigeria at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France.

The Young Lions Film competition seeks to discover the creative geniuses of the future. Teams of two young creatives will receive a brief from a selected charity to produce 30-second commercials filmed completely with a mobile phone and edited within 72 hours. The winning team will represent Nigeria at the international event during Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June 2010. Participants who must be born on or after June 26, 1982 will undergo an initial training on use of software and accessories. In 2009, DDB presented the team of Abolaji Alausa and Adebola Babatunde to represent Nigeria at this event for the second consecutive year.

The Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy is a high profile one week course in advertising held during the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. It is attended by international students studying advertising, marketing or related fields. The programme is made up of seminars, screenings and workshops. It is anchored by some of the leading lights in international advertising. Participants are able to network with their peers from other countries. At the end of the programme, they receive a certificate during a graduation ceremony that is of international value.

Participants of the Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy should be students of communications or marketing related courses, who have the intention of practicing advertising in future. Since 2009, Chini Productions have been organizing sessions where students are taught by senior practitioners from the advertising industry. The idea is to ensure that everybody benefits even if they don’t get selected to participate in France. After the short training programme, a test will be administered by the Advertising Practitioners’ Council of Nigeria, APCON, based on the programme content and their general knowledge of advertising, to select the best student, who will have the opportunity of representing Nigeria at the main Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy in Cannes, France. All participants will receive a certificate of participation. Participants should be between 18 and 23 years old. In 2009, Chini Productions facilitated the participation of 2 students (Opeyemi Adeniran, Mass Communications Department, University of Lagos and Oluwaseyi Ogundoro, School of Journalism, Lagos State University) in the Roger Hatchuel Lions Academy in France. It was the first time in the history of the academy to have students from sub-Saharan Africa in attendance.






The 2010 Dubai Lynx Awards, the leading creative advertising competition for the Middle East and Africa, will be chaired by three top industry leaders.




Amir Kassaei, Chief Creative Officer of DDB Group Germany will head the TV/Cinema, Print, Outdoor and Radio Jury.




David Nobay, Creative Chairman of Droga5 Australia, will chair the Direct & Sales Promotion and Interactive Jury.




The Media Jury will be led by Barry Cupples, CEO of Omnicom Media Group Asia Pacific.




"Once again, we are delighted to welcome to Dubai Lynx three highly respected international award-winning professionals to guide the juries as they continue to set the standard and ultimately raise the creative bar in the Middle East and Africa," said Philip Thomas, CEO of Cannes Lions, organiser of Dubai Lynx.




Amir Kassaei has been Creative Director and Managing Partner of the DDB Group in Germany since 2003, an agency that he has catapulted out of nowhere within the space of two short years, transforming it into one of Germany’s most creative shops.
He is one of the most highly-decorated creatives in the world, having won over 1600 national and international awards and has served on the most noted award shows around the globe. According to the Big Won Report (2007, 2008 and 2009), he is one of the three best chief creative officers in the world.




"I am honoured and proud to be this year’s TV/Cinema, Print, Outdoor and Radio Jury President. On the one hand because the Middle East will be the emerging region concerning communication, on the other hand it is like a journey home as I was born in Iran," said Amir on his appointment.
David Nobay is ranked in Archive Magazine’s Top Ten most published copywriters of the last millennium as well as being named as Australia’s most awarded creative director by Campaign Brief Magazine in 2008. In January of the same year, he was invited by David Droga to launch Droga5 Australia, the New York-based agency’s first foray into an international network.
During his career, David has been recognised by D&AD, Art Directors Club, New York Festivals, London Festivals, the Clio Awards, Cannes Lions and The One Show for a myriad of international clients, including Toyota, Lexus, Lion Nathan, Milk, the New York Times, Sony, Fox Sports, Intel and Datek Online. Under his leadership, Droga5 Sydney has just been named Agency of the Year in Australia by B&T magazine.




"Of course, I'm honoured to be leading the Direct & Sales Promotion and Interactive juries, but even more so, I’m genuinely intrigued: the categories are, in my opinion, where the most ambitious creativity is happening and geographically this is a region I've never worked in so I'm fascinated to see what will be revealed," commented David.
As CEO of Omnicom Media Group’s (OMG) Asia Pacific region since October 2007, Barry Cupples oversees media operations in 26 offices, spanning 13 countries.
Barry moved to OMG in 2006, serving both the media communications company OMD and the newly-launched media services company PHD. Under Barry’s leadership, OMD won significantly more awards on behalf of clients than any other regional competitor and, for the fourth time, was named Media Magazine's Media Agency of the Year in 2008.




"I am very honoured to have been asked to take part in such a prestigious event and I take the responsibility seriously to ensure that the best work gets the recognition it will surely deserve. Great work is no respecter of borders and I am really excited at the prospect of seeing this year’s entries and the solutions to business challenges that they will represent," said Barry.




"The world we live in has changed so much in the last 12 months and that seismic change is matched by the Communications industry where media platforms driven by technology and content and fed by a socially-aware consumer are evolving at a pace that is both inspirational and exciting for the future," he continued.






Entries can now be submitted online in the categories of TV/Cinema, Outdoor, Print, Radio, Interactive, Direct & Sales Promotion, Media, Integrated and, new for 2010, Craft. To submit entries or register to attend the Dubai International Festival, please go to http://www.dubailynx.com/.