Japan team wins Future Lion for India-centric idea ‘Awaken by Amazon’

The winners this year, including a team from Japan for a solution they created for Amazon in India, challenge conventional thinking and bring out breakthrough ideas for some of the brands. AKQA has been running the initiative ‘Future Lions’ at Cannes Lions International Festival for eight years now. So far, the initiative has seen 1500 entries from schools all over the world, awards going to 57 countries and deliberations on more than 5000 ideas.

 
James Hilton, AKQA, Co-Founder and CCO, said, “The reason we wanted to do this was because students were not represented in the world in Cannes. Young Lions were, but not the students. School is the last place in the world you can fail without impunity and you can go ahead and think out of the box because you cannot get fired for getting a brief wrong. We want to champion that mindset to allow people to go forward in life.”
AKQA, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity platform, has given out 61 Future Lions so far.
 
“We seek terrain unexplored,” said Ajaz Ahmad, Founder and CEO of AKQA who believes that there is no better articulation of this than the Future Lions competition.
Of the five awards given out this year, students from Japan won a Lion for their solution given for Amazon titled ‘Awaken by Amazon’. The premise of the thought that was that lack of books and illiteracy were real issues in various parts of the world. In the western markets, institutions are replacing print text books with tech led devices such as Kindle. ‘Awaken by Amazon’ built on this thought to encourage students from markets such as the United States to give away the books they were not using in exchange for a Kindle. Amazon would then distribute these books to markets in India. The concept ‘Amazon doesn’t waste any books’ resonated well with the brand  and was also timely given that Amazon announced its official foray in India earlier this month.
 

 
‘Awaken by Amazon’ was created by Konomi Tashiro: Tokyo Institute of Technology; Tatsuki Tatara, Kenji Shimo and Taichi Nihei: Keio University; Tomoki Hayashida: Waseda University, Japan
 
The other winning works included ‘Editorialist’ by Alexander Norling and Sara Uhelski: Miami Ad School San Francisco, USA; ‘IBM Project Accel’ by Jarrett Jamison and Verenice Lopez: The Creative Circus, USA, ‘Keep it’ by Alejandro Ladeveze and Caroline Escobar: Miami Ad School Hamburg, Germany and ‘The Pebble: Sense Danger’ by Thomas Bender and Thomas Corcoran: School of Communication Arts 2.0, UK.