Team Auckland take out Young Lotus competition

After a one-and-a-half day workshop and a 24-hour challenge, Team Auckland – Lachlan Palmer-Hubbard and Graeme Clarke – won the ADFEST Young Lotus Workshop in Thailand.

Their ‘China Go Further’ idea used cyclists representing Chinese cities to drum up friendly rivalry between the cities.

The Young Lotus Workshop was hosted by JWT Asia Pacific and attended by 34 young creatives from 17 countries.

“Young Lotus is a always firm ADFEST favourite with delegates,” muses ADFEST President Jimmy Lam. “Our agency partners bend over backwards to inspire our young teams with the benefit of experience and knowledge beyond their current years and boundaries. Over the eight years we have been running this session, the creative ideas that get developed in the space of 24 hours never cease to amaze me. Young Lotus creates a melting pot that invokes great team spirit and establishes close relationships that blossom along with people’s budding careers.”

This year’s theme was “How to get Inspired from Around the World”, aimed to get the Young Lotus participants to “rethink what’s normal and what’s not in the world.”

Young Lotus Chairman and Chief Mentor is Tay Guan Hin, Regional ECD, JWT Southeast Asia and Global ECD of Lux, Unilever, based in Singapore, who gathered a diverse group of people together from JWT, its suppliers and clients to provide inspiration for creating rich originality around JWT’s “Worldmade” philosophy, across a wide range of disciplines.

He said, “The Young Lotus Workshop can potentially fast forward careers. Beyond having the chance to put their talents to the test during the (Young Lotus Workshop 24-hour) Challenge, the participants get loads of inspiration from engaging with respected icons from a wide range of disciplines, as well as from networking with ECDs from all corners of the globe. Which makes sense, because we live in a very global society, and our ideas need to transcend borders and reach out to a global audience.”

The Young Lotus teams were given a challenge by Steven Tan, ASEAN Product Launch Leader for Ford, which is one of JWT’s largest clients: to help Ford engage and capture the imagination of Chinese consumers by promoting a newly designed bicycle, called the E-Bike. After presenting their work, the JWT mentors selected the top 3 teams: Mayuresh Dubhashi and Vanburn Gonsalves, Mumbai; Yuanheng Gao and Andrew Kian Lim, Singapore and overall winners Graeme Clarke and Lachlan Palmer-Hubbard, Auckland.

“The jury had a hard time deliberating on the top three finalists. Every single team did amazing work within just 24 hours,” says Tay Guan Hin, Chairman of the Young Lotus Workshop 2012. “However, three teams stood out from the rest for having an idea that’s clear and simple and that solves the client’s problem in a creative way, providing a meaningful, engaging experience to the end consumer.”

The top three teams were invited to present their work on stage during the ‘Young Lotus 2011 Final Showdown’.

The remaining JWT Asia Pacific executives mentoring this year’s 17 Young Lotus teams include: Anne Mack, Director of Trendspotting, JWT New York; Asawin Rojmethatawee, Marketing Manager, Heineken Thailand; François Chilot, CFP-E / YDA President, The Young Directors Awards (YDA); Michael Yezerski, Composer, Nylon Music Studios in Sydney; Pat Law, Blogger & Boss Lady at Goodstuph in Singapore and Ravi Deshpande, Chairman and Chief Creative of Contract Advertising India.

The 17 teams participating in this year’s Young Lotus Workshop were from: Auckland, Bangkok, Beijing, Colombo, Dhaka, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kathmandu, Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore Taipei, and Tokyo.