Orchard duo wins Young Creatives Contest; to represent India at Cannes

The chance to officially represent India at this year's International Young Creatives Contest at the Cannes International Advertising Festival is "the best dream come true", for 22-year-old Mark Flory, visualizer and interactive head, Orchard Advertising, Bangalore. Flory, of course, isn't going to Cannes alone. Accompanying him will be creative partner Nishant Gangadharan, a 27-year-old copy supervisor with Orchard.

The young duo has won this year's AAAI Young Creatives Contest, organized locally by the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI). The AAAI had organized the competition late last month with the express purpose of identifying the best Indian team to represent India at the international contest. The Indian competition had been open to teams from all INS accredited agencies, each team comprising a copywriter, an art director and a web designer.

Flory and Gangadharan were among the many teams that put their heads together to create a press ad and an Internet banner based on the theme of Child Labour. The purpose of the advertising was to tell people not to employ children as domestic help, but send them to school instead. Flory and Gangadharan's winning entry is a simple ad, representing the blank pages of a notebook. In one corner of the right-hand page is a series of squiggles, which, at first glance, appears to be very small handwriting. Closer inspection reveals that it's a drawing of a child hanging clothes on a clothesline. ‘It's not a job they need, it's an education. Don't employ children as domestic help,' the copy exhorts.

"There was no real strategy involved," says Gangadharan. "We just felt that we did not want to show yet another ‘sad' picture of a child at work. We wanted the ‘concept' itself to affect people. Besides, we reasoned that showing a sad picture of a child at work would, in any case, be the easiest thing to do, and hence, most would also resort to doing that." Gangadharan, incidentally, was with Lowe, Bangalore, before he joined Orchard. Flory had just a six-month internship at McCann-Erickson India prior to Orchard. Bagging an expenses-paid trip to Cannes for a week is an exhilarating experience, but both admit that representing the country "is a big responsibility on us". © 2003 agencyfaqs!