World’s top young creatives: Go up against the likes of Google in ‘Urgent Genius Weekender II’
Creative agency iris will launch the second in its annual global newsjacking competition series, the ‘Urgent Genius Weekender II’ this weekend 2nd-4th March, as it continues to highlight to brands the benefits of fast, shareable content online in today’s consumer-driven world of advertising.
In a twist, the competition, which saw over 150 teams take part last year from some of the world’s top creative companies such as Google, Fallon and Wieden+Kennedy, will this year be open to youth from some of the world’s top creative institutions.
Following the success of last year’s Weekender and with four accepted panels at South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2012 – more than any other agency globally – iris will be opening its doors to industry creatives, students and DIY hackers alike to test their wares against institutions such as Google in a 48-hour digital marathon. In the style of Urgent Genius – iris’ social media arm whose philosophy states the need for brands to create topical, social ideas at speed – participants are asked to choose a trending topic, before creating and seeding content for it over the course of 48 hours in a bid to gain the most online traffic.
Grant Hunter, regional creative director for iris in Asia and co-founder of its Urgent Genius division, says: “For topical content to be effective for brands, it must be created and seeded within 12 to 48 hours of the news story landing in your RSS reader. That’s the only way to guarantee that it will cut through. That’s the art of Urgent Genius. Agencies are evolving to become more like newsrooms, creating a new hybrid of ‘brand journalism’ and working to news-like deadlines.”
Companies involved in the initiative include many of iris’ fellow advertising agencies, such as Saatchi and Saatchi, BBH Labs, Made By Many, Crispin Porter Bogusky, Wieden+Kennedy, McCann Erickson, LBi, DDB, Grey, Wired UK, Profero and Google Creative Labs. A selection of those uthors on the topic of newsjacking such as David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing and PR) and Grant McCracken (Chief Culture Officer) will judge the work.
Creative colleges to participate are likely to include LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, London College of Communication, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, UK), VCU Brandcenter (Virginia, US) and School of Communication Arts (London, UK).
Says Ian Millner, joint global CEO and co-founder of iris: “To be as important to the future of globalcreativity as we have been to the past, we need to be looking for a completely new breed of creative thinker. Creativity today is cultural; it moves fast, it has lots of levels and layers and to do it successfully it needs people with ‘hybrid’ skills (part creative, part editor, part strategist) but above all it needs those who have an ‘experimental attitude’ to their work.
Urgent Genius is for this new generation of creative thinker.”
Recent examples of newsjacking by brands include Kraft’s “Golden Voice of Love” Valentine’s Day promotion, WWF’s GreenGraffiti on the frozen canals in Amsterdam, Twisted Metal’s “Shoot My Truck” campaign and MasterCard’s post-Super Bowl “Priceless” ads. Competitors can create any form of online content they wish including infographics, interactive games, films and mashup websites. Content from last year’s competition made it onto such acclaimed sources as MTV, Rolling Stone, Empire magazine and The Guardian.
The competition will begin this Friday 2nd March at 1800 hours (teams’ local time) with a briefing on a topic of global interest. Teams of up to seven from around the UK will congregate in a dedicated area of iris’ London office on Thursday 1st March to receive the brief at 1800 hours (GMT), but teams in other countries will be briefed remotely. Teams will have until 1800 hours (local time) Sunday 4th March to produce their content.
Content will then be reviewed by a panel of judges, with an initial round of culling where only the best bits of content will go through to the next round. Teams will then have seven days to seed their content*.
To win, entrants must generate the most traffic in terms of ‘Likes’, shares and views in the seven days following the competition. The ‘Urgent Genius Power Rule’ (based on ‘The Real-time Power Law’ by David Meerman Scott), will then calculate true influence by taking into account a team’s current seeding network, attempting to level the playing field for an individual entering versus a team.
The best work will feature in a talk by Urgent Genius founders Grant Hunter and Jon Burkhart at the world’s biggest interactive festival SXSW in March and in a book to be published by Thames and Hudson in 2012.