Leo Burnett Melbourne has taken the honors in Round 11.1 of IAB Australia’s Creative Showcase for its “Reword” campaign which uses an online tool to help young people recognise online bullying.

Second place went to Clemenger for “Whiskas Cat Hacks” and third was awarded to WiTH Collective for its work for Optus on the “Olympics for Small Business” campaign.

Leo Burnett’s Reword campaign uses a real-time spellchecker to identify online bullying. Using regex (regular expression) matching as the child types, the tool searches a database of bullying words to identify patterns. When a bullying pattern is recognised from hundreds of thousands of potential combinations, the child is alerted with a red strikethrough, interrupting their impulsive behavior.

“This is a beautifully conceived idea, especially the co-authoring aspect meaning the children have genuine ownership over it,” said Creative Showcase judge Lachlan Pottenger, creative Director of FIRST DIGITAL.

In conjunction with the headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation, Leo Burnett Melbourne piloted Reword in two schools prior to launching it as a free Google Chrome extension and through schools on the National Day of Action against Bullying and Violence. The tool is used by 60 schools across three states, and has over 20,000 active users.  15,000 new insults have been added since its inception.

Clemenger was tasked with proving Whiskas understood and cared for cats in the face of rising competition in the cat food industry. Cat Hacks offers instructions on how to modify flat-pack furniture to make it more cat-friendly by catering to cats’ natural curiosity. Items such as the clock feeder, the coffee table hammock and the bookshelf hidey hole are all made from existing items for the benefit of feline friends. Tapping into the existing market for cat videos, in two weeks the campaign received over 870,000 film views and more than 7 million-impressions.

Second runner-up WiTH Collective was given the complex task of converting small business sales and driving engagement for Optus as well as reinforcing the company’s position as a small-business support network.  The campaign which offered a prize of four trips to Rio 2016 for small business owners involved a national promotion for Australian icon Ian Thorpe’s faux pool-cleaning business leading to a mockumentary explaining the promotion and then to olympicsforsmallbusiness.com, a landing page where business owners entered the competition and built their own competition landing page.  Small business sales increased by 30 percent year on year during the promotional period with over 50 percent non-Optus customer entries and 40 percent in return visitors.

Now in its 11^th year, the IAB Creative Showcase competition series accepts entries for digital work completed in the three months prior to close of judging for each round and only one campaign per agency is allowed.

Creative Showcase 11.1 Winners:

First place
Creative agency: Leo Burnett
Brand name: National Youth Mental Health Foundation

Second place
Creative agency: Clemenger
Brand name: Whiskas

Third place
Creative agency: WiTH Collective
Brand name: Optus