Harry Neville and Carl Edwards score Silver in Print category of Young Spikes competition; Queenie Ling + Tim Hull score Bronze in Media

Australian young creatives Harry Neville of BMF and Carl Edwards of InMobi have been awarded Silver on the final day of the 2015 Spikes Asia Festival and Queenie Ling of MEC and Tim Hull of Mediacom have taken home Bronze in the Media category.

Neville (far left) and Edwards (near left) were in Singapore last week representing Australia after successfully competing in the 2015 Australian Young Lions competition which is run by News Corp Australia, the official Australian representative of the 2015 International Cannes Lions Festival and Spikes Asia.

With a Gold and Silver award already won in Cannes in June, these two bring the total tally to four and make 2015 the most successful year for young Australian creatives.

Says Sharb Farjami, director of national sales, News Corp Australia: “Congratulations to Harry and Carl on an outstanding result and doing such a good job of representing Australia. 2015 has been an wonderful year of creative accolades with other young creative teams winning gold and silver in Cannes. This added award shows the future of the creative industry here in Australia is in very good hands.”

Neville and Edwards were competing in the print category where their challenge was to create a way to encourage 13-16 year old children to fundraise for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Teams had 24 hours to deliver on the brief.

Neville said the pair’s idea was all about appealing to the entire school community as well as the broader community in an engaging way. The idea was to get a famous playwright to write a play on a hot topic for WWF that the school could produce themselves with all proceeds from ticket sales going to the charity.

Edwards said the duo was stoked to have been placed second and had enjoyed their time at Spikes Asia.

Says Edwards: “While it’s great to have come away with an award, the less formal side of the festival has also been a huge highlight. It’s been great to meet people of a similar age and stage in their career and share experiences.”

The judges admitted it was difficult to split out the top two entries from Australia and Malaysia. Despite Malaysia coming away with the gold on this occasion, the Australian entry was praised for being a solid idea and the duo was complimented on their presentation style.

Ling (near left) and Hull (far left) were competing in the media category and had 24 hours to respond to a brief for the UN Women Singapore Committee to change the perception of the word ‘feminism’ to something that is inclusive of all genders.

Ling said the duo’s research involved a visit to the UN Women’s office in Singapore to meet with and ask questions of the staff. The idea they presented was to leverage the national spirit of Singaporeans and use that to create a national petition to redefine the word feminism by changing what is means on information sources such as Wikipedia.

Says Ling: “It has been an amazing experience and a highlight of my career.”

The panel judging the media category were impressed with the extent to which the team had gone to understand the Singaporean culture in such a tight deadline.​