BBDO Belgium has won its second Grand Prix of the week for its brilliant and inspiring campaign for Decathlon.
It has now added the top prize in PR to its Creative Strategy Grand Prix for ‘The Breakaway: The First eCycling Team For Prisoners’. The campaign uses virtual cycling platform Zwift to allow inmates from a maximum-security Belgian prison to cycle and interact with people in the outside world — a life-changing experience that has had a significant impact on the mental-health of the participants. In fact, so positive have the results been that the initiative has now been extended to all Belgian prisoners, with other countries also considering adopting what amounts to a whole new way of rehabilitating offenders.
PR jury president Judy John, global chief creative officer at Edelman, said: “’The Breakaway’ is amazing on so many levels. We all noticed that every time we watched it, new nuances to the story appeared. It’s inclusive, inspiring and has created a whole new way of thinking about prisoner rehabilitation. It’s also a sustainable idea that’s scalable. It opens up a debate about fairness and empathy, has triggered meaningful change and is very modern in terms of both thought and execution.”
John added that the PR jury’s decision had been unanimous because “this is a movement, not merely a moment, and provides a bridge between the real world and the metaverse”.