Leo Burnett Solutions Inc. (LBSI), the local office of the global advertising network Leo Burnett Worldwide once again brought recognition to the Sri Lankan marketing communications industry from ADFEST 2014, Asia Pacific’s premier advertising festival and awards show. The agency walked away with glowing honours, bringing home its first Gold Lotus Award in the Promo: Best use of Print/Conventional Outdoor category. The agency also won its first Lotus Root Award for the Unity Paper and was also a finalist in the Lotus Root and Design Lotus: Typography categories.
The Leo Burnett Sri Lanka team saw itself shine and triumph at ADFEST 2014 amongst the 1,095 delegates from 53 cities that attended the event with 3,253 entries across 17 awards categories. The Leo Burnett network with a total of 70 finalists and 37 metals was named runner up for the Network of the Year in Asia Pacific at ADFEST. In addition to the Sri Lanka office, the network’s offices from Jakarta, Tokyo, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, Beirut, Cairo, Bangkok, Dubai, Hong Kong, Manila and Istanbul contributed to this success.
Held annually in Pattaya, Thailand, the festival hosts delegates from Asia Pacific and the Middle East to celebrate creativity. On its 17th year the theme for ADFEST 2014 was ‘Co-Create the Future’ which highlighted the importance of the consumer. A variety of innovative and powerful ideas that cut across language and cultural barriers emerged winners from the region at this year’s festival. Amongst these winning ideas was Leo Burnett Sri Lanka’s ‘Unity Paper’, the country’s first ever Sinhala and Tamil newspaper published with the Ada to commemorate the National New Year. This innovative idea was created by Leo Burnett in partnership with Starcom the media independent of the Publicis Groupe. Leo Burnett Sydney also saw its ‘Small World Machines’ campaign created for its client Coca-Cola winning the Grand Prix for Outdoor and several other metals. This success also contributed to Coca Cola being named the Advertiser of the Year at Adfest 2014.
The winning Unity Paper initiative by Leo Burnett Sri Lanka was created to remind every Sri Lankan of the importance of national unity and integration in a country which suffered many setbacks due to the 30 year civil war. The first dual language newspaper was printed in support of uniting the country’s multicultural ethnic groups under the uniting banner of being Sri Lankan. This act was preluded via a social media campaign with a joint alphabet where letters from the Sinhala and Tamil alphabets which represented the same phonetic sound were interlocked. This campaign engaged 15% of all Facebook users in Sri Lanka within the first five days of its launch.
The ‘Unity Paper’ by Leo Burnett Solutions Inc., the leading creative communications company in Sri Lanka, is yet another simple yet singular approach of the company capturing the purpose of the company – ‘HumanKind’ – which is putting a brand's purpose at the centre of communications to truly connect with people.
