YoungGuns International Award - Guns International

YoungGuns International Award (also referenced as YoungGuns Award and YGAward) is an annual global award show for young and emerging creative talent in the advertising and communication industry. The award recognizes the best young commercial practitioners and students across the fields of advertising, communication design, digital creative, advertising media and public relations from around the world. Entrants into the award must be aged 30 or under.

Entrants for the award compete for gold, silver and bronze awards across 8 divisions and 40 categories. Every year, two ultimate winners will be determined and named YoungGun of the Year and YoungGun Student of the Year.

History

Kristian Barnes, Jason Williams, and Michael Kean (CEO of market-leading global creative recruitment firm FBI Recruitment) founded the YoungGuns Award in 2001 from Sydney, Australia with the goal of recognizing and promoting upcoming talent rather than rewarding years of experience. They noted that the reason for starting the award was their frustration that major awards at the time were typically won by well established individuals within the industry.

Call for entry

YoungGuns was the first international award to produce an advertising campaign for its call of entries. The campaigns are renowned for being controversial. Most notable include "Peak Early" which focused on child prodigies and "Quit in Style" which allowed anyone to upload content such as videos and feedback to demonstrate how they would quit their jobs. Despite the controversy the yearly campaigns have proven to be quite appealing to the creative industry. Some campaigns have managed to receive recognition in other creative awards such as the New Zealand Grande Axis and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

The call for entries campaigns are usually created by selective advertising agencies or creative collaborations from all around the world. Some of the past Call for Entry campaign creators included Droga5, The Glue Society, Taxi, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and Saatchi & Saatchi (New Zealand).

Jury panel

The jury consists of an international panel of over a world class Creative Leader (2014 Jury Chairman announced as Mike Byrne - Partner / Chief Creative Officer of Anomaly), the best up & coming creative stars from the majority of global advertising agency networks, as previous year's winner of "YoungGuns of the Year".

Past winners

• 2001 Guy Shelmerdine and Grant Holland (Cliff Freeman & Partners New York)
• 2002 Antony Nelson (Saatchi & Saatchi London)
• 2003 Trevor Clarence (Terraplane South Africa)
• 2004 Travis Sorge (Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles)
• 2005 Juan Cabral (Fallon London) - most notable for creating and directing Cadbury Dairy Milk's Gorilla (advertisement) in 2007
• 2006 Matt Devine and Luke Crethar (Glue Society Sydney)
• 2007 Jeff Anderson and Isaac Silvergate (TBWA Chiat Day New York)
• 2008 Craig Allen and Eric Kallman (TBWA Chiat Day New York)
• 2009 Michael Canning (Leo Burnett Sydney)
• 2010 Douglas Goh (McCann Erickson Malaysia)
• 2011 Alexander Nowak and Felix Richter (Y&R New York)
• 2012 Rasmus Keger and Morten Halvorsen (R/GA New York)
• 2013 Tarik Abdel-Gawad (Bot & Dolly New York)

References