Clever ‘Abolish the Penny’ idea leads to Gold Medal for Australia’s Young Media Lions

June 24 2009, 3:28 am | BY Lynchy | 5 Comments

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Australians Lauren Cassar and Tristan Burrell of UniversalMcCann have won the Gold Medal in the Young Lions Media Competition. Silverwent to Belarus and Bronze to the US.

The competition asked the 25 international teams to createan innovative media/contact strategy to raise awareness and funding to helpfeed 59 million hungry people for the World Food Program, the United Nationsfrontline agency in the fight against global hunger. 

Their winning entry ‘abolish the penny’ revolved around prompting people to donate their lowestform of currency – the one cent, two cent and five cent coins or pennies storedin jars at home because they are too small to use – to the WFP.  This would then be applied acrossdifferent nations to ‘abolish’ the smallest form of currency in that particularnation.

UM communications strategist Cassar said they are shockedabout winning.  

“We knew that we had a strong idea and we hoped that itwould please the judges but we knew that there was really tough competition inthe category,” she said. “We are extremely pleased to have done Australia proudand we are appreciative to News Limited and our agency, Universal McCann tohave given us the opportunity to compete. The brief was delivered with suchintense passion that we wanted to give the challenge justice and were inspiredto build a strategy that truly could help to eradicate the world hungercrisis.”

Her teammate, Burrell, who is a media plannerat UM, added that the competition was harder than he expected.

“But it was a reallymotivating brief, and that kept us motivated. The idea came out of a casualconversation, and we just got cracking on it.”

The duo will receive their Gold Medal tonight during theMedia, Radio and Outdoor Lions Awards Ceremony.  Judges were Hee-il Shin, executive director, SamsungElectronics France, Steve Blakeman, chief planning officer, MediabrandsSingapore, Alan Cohen, CEO of OMD, USA, and Bonnie Barest, EVP and managingdirector of Optimedia US.