UM strategy executives Charlotte Berry and Grace Espinoza (pictured above) have been awarded silver in the Young Lions Media competition at the 2017 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Berry and Espinoza are in Cannes representing Australia (and blogging for B&T too!), having won the 2017 Australian Young Lions competition, run by News Corp Australia, the official Australian representative of the 2017 International Cannes Lions Festival.

“We loved our concept and are thrilled to be bringing home silver from Cannes,” Berry and Espinoza said in a joint statement.

“We want to thank News Corp Australia for giving us this incredible opportunity.”

News Corp Australia chief marketing officer Tony Phillips said: “We’re thrilled with the success of our Cannes Young Lions media guns Charlotte and Grace, who beat tough competition from more than 30 countries. You have done Australia proud.”

The Young Lions media challenge was to help Amnesty International refresh their ‘Write for Rights’ campaign, reaching a new millennial audience. Teams had just 24 hours to deliver on the brief.

“We went in with a clear strategy to crack the idea and said to ourselves that 2017 was going to be our year,” Berry and Espinoza said.

“Our hotel room swiftly became a war zone, covered in fluorescent post it notes which you could see outside the hotel.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster, but as soon as we believed we cracked the idea, we wrote a list of ‘Why We Love It’ – some wise advice given to us by our original mentor and national strategy director at UM, Sam Greer.

“We had this same feeling of pure joy and excitement in the Australian finals, so when it overcame us again, we knew we were onto something big.”

‘Write for Rights’ asks people to submit letters to show support for people who are suffering human rights abuses, such as being unfairly imprisoned for speaking out against injustice. To date, the campaign has delivered 4.66 million letters, emails and other actions.

Berry and Espinoza’s idea involved compelling university graduates to commit to ‘Write for Rights’ at graduation.

“Letter writing is no longer a pre-existing behaviour, particularly for millennials, so we needed to identify a group of Millennials who had the time and compassion to write letters,” they said.

“We realised these individuals are all in one place – universities – the place you start to define and declare your beliefs. The pinnacle of your university experience is graduation – the moment you want to take on the world – and the most photographed and documented day of your life from Facebook photos to the framed image on the wall of your parents house.

“We created an Amnesty International yellow clip, that would be attached to graduation tassels, acting as a sign of solidarity and a public declaration that each graduating student was going to write a letter.

“We also recommended that people who have been wrongly imprisoned and experienced human rights abuses, be invited as a guest speaker at graduation ceremonies around the world, inspiring others to ‘Write for Rights’ in the future.”