The Lebanese campaign "Vote for us. We'll vote for you" and Egyptian campaign "Give Mom Back Her Name" were among the eight winners of the first-ever Glass Lion Awards at this year's Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, which was held last week.
The annual festival honors the most creative advertising campaigns in the world through its prestigious Lion Awards. Dubbed the "Academy Awards for advertising," the ceremonies bring together the world's top advertising professionals.
The Glass Lion: The Lion for Change is a new award category that was created this year to recognize the campaigns that tackle the issues of gender equality and gender stereotypes. The award was created in partnership with Lean In, the organization founded by Facebook Chief Operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in 2013 to help women deal with challenges in the workplace.
Leo Burnett Beirut's “Vote For Us. We’ll Vote For You” campaign for KAFA (Enough), a Lebanese organization that fights exploitation of and violence against women in Lebanon, targeted the sharp rise of domestic violence against women in Lebanon in 2014 and the continued absence of legislation that criminalizes it.
The campaign came about after KAFA drafted a domestic violence law that was ignored in the Lebanese Parliament. The campaign's goal was to put pressure on members of Parliament by threatening them with their votes. It used a simple visual of the voting thumb colored in red (as opposed to its usual blue) to symbolize the blood of the injured women, and urged people to color their voting thumbs in red and share their photos on social media.
It soon caught wide-scale media attention and support in Lebanon and proceeded to cause a stir on social media. By playing on the fact that women constitute 52 percent of the voting force in Lebanon, it eventually succeeded in pressuring Parliament to pass the law in 2014.
Impact BBDO Dubai's " Give Mom Her Name Back " campaign for UN Women, which was directed by Egyptians Maged Nassar and Tameem Youness, targeted the commonly held social taboo in Egypt and the Middle East concerning how one should not publicly reveal their mother's name. Publicly revealing one's mother's name has always been shrouded in shame or embarrassment in Middle Eastern societies, as mothers are referred to as "the mother of her eldest son."
The campaign included interviews with men in the streets asking them to reveal their mothers' names to no avail. It urged people to share their mothers' names on social media using the hashtag #MyMothersNameIs. The campaign caused a social media firestorm and attracted international media attention as the ad went viral and the hashtag became a trending topic on Twitter.
The campaign's simple plea to get people to share their mothers' names as a gift for mother's day in March 2015 succeeded in starting an online conversation and debate on the issues of gender equality, as large numbers of people all over the world, including celebrities, participated by changing their profile pictures, using the hashtag and posting their own videos.