Three teams of BA (Hons) Creative Advertising students, made up of seven students, have been shortlisted for the Cannes Future Lions challenge.
The challenge is part of Cannes Lions: The International Festival of Creativity. More than 2,100 students from 69 countries take part in the global competition. Creative Advertising student Hannah Hargreaves was one of the winning entries last year with her project Lego Digital Assistance.
British apparel brand Gymshark set this year's challenge brief. Students were asked to create work to empower people to overcome barriers and reach their fitness goals. The three shortlisted teams are second year students Lily Sullivan, Robbo Robinson and Sean Noble and two final year team's Elli Winstanley and Megan Holmes, and Emma Wakley, Ava O’Donnell and Jayne Smith.
"The brief was really fun and it was exciting to get the kind of brief where there is no limit on your creativity! We tried to go a different way around things and it's nice to see that the judges liked it!"
Emma Wakley, Ava O’Donnell and Jayne Smith said: “We are delighted to have been shortlisted for the Cannes Future Lions award, it was a big surprise for us. We all really enjoyed the freedom that we had with this brief as we weren’t initially given a particular area to research other than the world of conditioning and gyms.
"We chose to go down the route of woman's safety as we discovered that this is currently a huge issue within gyms and keeping fit outside of gyms too. Our aim was to help women to feel safer in gyms by creating a girl community and make reporting harassment easier. We did this by creating an app called Girlspot. We think that brands like Gymshark should be doing more to resolve this issue and to make girls feel more comfortable whilst working out around others.”
Winners will pitch their ideas live during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Future Lions Grand Prix will also award one team the chance to turn their idea into reality. The winners will be announced in June 2022.