Sueann Tannis, senior director, Integrated Communications at the United Nations Foundation, and president of the Lions Health Grand Prix for Good announced at a press conference yesterday that Lil Sugar - Master of Disguise by Hip Hop Public Health, had won the Grand Prix.
The campaign, which uses rap to get its message across to both vulnerable kids and adults, is about fighting the fact that sugar has 150 different names, an obvious ploy by the industrial food industry to hide how much sugar it is putting in processed foods, despite its health risks.
“Alongside the many praiseworthy aspects of this hugely important campaign, I’d like to say a word about the genuine inclusivity and diversity of my fellow jurors and thank them for giving me a great judging experience,” Tannis said. “We were judging entries based on equality, justice, inclusiveness, and use of technology, among other criteria, and we all agreed that Lil Sugar is a phenomenal piece of work that challenges our assumptions about what’s in our food, and using rap and rappers from the early days of the genre to get kids and adults on board was a master stroke. Lil Sugar has already been seen by three million students across 5000 schools in the New York area, and it’s eminently scaleable, plus it can adopt any kind of music to reach out to different demographics.”
VML Y&R’s killer concept wins top prize for Health & Wellness
The winner of the 2022 Health & Wellness Grand Prix is ‘The Killer Pack’ from Indian agency VML Y&R.
The product, made by Maxx Flash, is a small, biodegradable packet that kills mosquitoes outdoors by destroying their eggs. Simply by leaving the pack in the trash bins, rubbish dumps, puddles and garden ponds where the insects breed, it has already made a significant different to insect-borne malaria cases across India.
Announcing the award, Health & Wellness jury president Patricia Corsi, Bayer Consumer Health’s chief marketing and digital officer, and chief information officer said:
“’The Killer Pack’ is brilliant on so many levels. It uses existing pesticides, it doesn’t harm other species and it’s extendable to other regions of the world plagued by mosquitoes. All the jury felt very strongly about the product and the campaign’s potential to save lives.”
Corsi also reported that there had been significant growth in the number of submissions to the Health & Wellness category. “We were very happy to see so many entries,” she added. “But perhaps the most significant thing is that all five continents were represented among the entries. We awarded Health & Wellness Gold Lions to Asian, South American, North American and European agencies.”
MND book banks Pharma Grand Prix
VML Y&R won its second Grand Prix yesterday for ‘I Will Always Be Me’, which took the top honour in the Pharma category. The campaign by VML Y&R New York for Dell Technologies aims to give people with motor neuron disease (MND) the words to express what they are experiencing and preserve their voices.
Announcing the award, Pharma jury president Brett O’Connor, executive creative director of VCCP Health, said: “It’s a brilliant project that leverages AI alongside a book of common phrases to massively reduce the amount of time and effort that people with MND have to spend in order to make a ‘bank’ of their voice for when they lose the ability to speak.”
MND is a terminal illness that ultimately destroys people’s ability to speak. Banking a person’s voice helps them to communicate in the later stages of the disease, but it typically takes three months and requires 1,600 phrases to be banked in order to accurately replicate a voice. VML Y&R worked with author Jill Twiss to create a short story that people with MND can read to their loved ones. As they read, the system seamlessly banks their voice. All the syllables needed to create a copy of their voice are contained in the book.
“This is such a touching story that really hits you in the feels,” O’Connor added. “For me and all the jury, the important thing is that it buys precious time for seriously ill people by condensing what used to take three months into 30 minutes.”