MEET THE STUDENTS CONTEST JURY
Meet our Students Contest jurors and find out why they crowned the Pattex ad as this year’s winner by Dong Hun Lee and Jurgen Egger Ochsenius.
The winning ad for Pattex by Dong Hun Lee and Jurgen Egger Ochsenius.
The Lürzer's Archive Students Contest was first suggested to us by Oliver Voss seven years ago. He was at the time already one of the leading ad creatives in Germany (Jung von Matt, Germany) and associated with Miami Ad School, Hamburg. We thought it was a great idea, so started devoting two pages in each issue to student work.
The featured work is automatically nominated for the Lürzer's Archive Student of the Year Award and once a year we invite our readers to choose the piece of work they think is deserving of an award.
In the beginning we simply awarded the piece that received the most votes, but after a couple of years we had second thoughts about this: Of course it was great if the work got lots of votes, but we had slight suspicions that this might become a popularity award instead of one honouring outstanding students and their creativity. So we decided to add a small jury that would have a close look at the five highest-ranking pieces and then decide which was the true winner. For this jury I always ask some young(ish) creatives around the world to lend me a hand in crowning our winner of the year.
This year, I enlisted the services of three very cool and even more creative guys:
Ben Gough - Leo Burnett, London
The award-winning creative came from an integrated and digital background at EHS 4D and has worked at Euro RSCG BETC, Paris. As his bio states, he “enjoys the relentless pursuit for the big idea and talking about himself in the third person”. Of course Ben is also the mastermind behind our very own "Untouchable Covers" campaign which we - as well as many other publications around the world have written about extensively and which is pretty much the most brilliant - as well as most beautifully executed - campaign for our magazine that I have seen in my 25 years here.
Abolaji Alausa - Noah’s Ark, Lagos
The young Nigerian creative director claims that his first love was comic books, and he's actually published a couple of them. Abolaji never actually thought of advertising until his second year in college when he noticed some part-time students driving cool cars.
He majored in Painting at Yaba College, graduated with First Class honours but soon found that his canvases weren't paying the bills as fast as he'd hoped, which is why he turned to advertising and got his first job in the industry with Rosabel Leo Burnett in 2006. A year later, this was followed by a five-year-stint at DDB, Lagos.
He has won several national awards, notably LAIF (Lagos Advertising & Ideas Festival) and the local Young Lions competition in 2009. Thanks to his efforts, Noah's Ark has become the first Nigerian agency ever to have their work featured in Archive.
Francisco Valle - Brazil
At 26, this art director and illustrator who lives in Belo Horizonte is the youngest of the jury, yet has already been working in advertising for eight years and has also been featured in Archive.
As for the nominees, which you can see here, the two Converse ads (which we decided to count as a campaign, adding up the votes they got) came out on top in our readers’ poll. We certainly understood the appeal of those two funny and well-executed ads for the shoe brand but decided - independently and unamimously - to give the Lürzer's Archive Student of the Year award to the Pattex ad which had come in a very close second (and was actually ahead in the readers’ poll if one took the votes for the two Converse ads separately).
Juror Ben described it as "clean and simple”.
“I thought they found a good truth in the fact that, when model making, instant glue is the last thing you need. But dramatising the product benefit, by showing the negative, makes for a funny execution. Plus, as a Brit, I like a bit of self-depricating humour."
Francisco said: “It has a more subtle idea that includes the spectator in the advert, like "we glue it fast, what you do with it is up to you".
And I liked Abolji's statement so much that I'm quoting it here in full:
"My student of the year is Dong Hun Lee for Pattex. Not just because of the level of craft, the detailed finishing, the depth of field of the beautiful shot, subtly deemphasising and highlighting as appropriate. Definitely not just because he purchased a prop. But because he sold an age-old proposition from a different, albeit somewhat negative premise.
“We mistakenly glue our fingers together all the time but we never bother to campaign that. The piece depicts the instant nature of the glue, the permanence, hence the need for utmost care and confidence when handling. It’s a marriage with no divorce window; you have to be absolutely sure."
I must admit now that the Pattex ad had also been my favourite contender from the beginning. Not only does the ad tick all the right boxes, it also resonates with me personally, which is why I find it so very funny.
As a kid I was really impatient with this type of assemblage that would yield a bloody ship or aircraft or whatever. Even jigsaw puzzles drove me mad and it was not just the once that I took a hammer to a piece that just wouldn't fit in with the rest. So if had been asked to assemble a piece like this back then, Pattex would have been very handy indeed and my "tank" would have looked exactly the same.
Tune in again next Friday to find out more about this year's Student Contest winners Dong Hun Lee and Jurgen Egger Ochsenius.
