Young Guns go full blast

MUMBAI: It was an evening of celebration for Mudra, Ogilvy & Mather and Everest Brand Solutions.

Young creative minds, below 30 years of age, from these agencies picked up the honours at the YoungGuns Awards hosted by the Advertising Club of Bombay on Tuesday night.

Mudra, O&M and Everest won one gold, two silvers and a bronze, respectively.

Kristian Barnes, founder of the Australia-based YoungGuns, said, "In Asia, the YoungGuns Awards is hosted in Singapore and India. On a global platform, India ranks fifth and is preceded by Australia, the US, Singapore and New Zealand."

This year, 52 countries sent in their entries for the awards. Of this, 27 creatives received the bullets (called so since the awards are in the shape of bullets).

However, globally only 13 creatives from 10 countries picked up the gold bullet. From India, YoungGuns zeroed in on 14 finalists, and out of that, four won bullets.

O R Radhakrishnan, creative group head, Mudra, bagged the gold bullet for his work 'Cell Phone' that he created for Hindustan Motors.

Kunal Sawant from O&M picked up a silver bullet for the 'Bed, Book, Toys' campaign for IAPA.

The second silver bullet was bagged by Abhinav Pratiman and Rishi Chanana, also from O&M, for 'Toys', an entry for Gillette India.

The bronze bullet was won by Nishant Sethi from Everest Brand Solutions for 'Graveyard', a campaign created for the Cancer Patients Aid Association. The other finalists from India were Nrusingha Chowdhury of Saatchi & Saatchi, Sujoy Roy, Kunal Sawant, Sukesh Kumar Nayak, Vijay Sawant and Saish Kambli of O&M, Vinayak Gaikwad of Ambience Publicis, Shikhar Mohan of Mudra DDB (now with Everest), and Vinod Savio of Grey Worldwide.

That's a good sign for NextGen creative talent.