A team of five students from The University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences (C&IS) has been awarded a Silver Pencil from the Young Ones annual student award show.
Erin Brown, Morgan Egan, Ginger Ellis, Matthias Meyer and Miles Neto, who comprised the winning team, are all students in Minerva, the creative advertising portfolio program housed within C&IS.
The Young Ones is a highly competitive, international creative advertising competition hosted by The One Club for Creativity in New York City each year. A pencil award from The One Club is one of the most prestigious awards given in the advertising industry, and the team’s Silver Pencil is the highest award that has even been earned by students at The University of Alabama who have participated in the competition.
“Winning a Silver Pencil is incredible because it means that others in the advertising industry agree with what we are doing,” said Morgan Egan.
This year’s competition required students to respond to a creative brief from one of four sponsoring brands including Call of Duty: Warzone, Bang & Olufsen, DoorDash and Spotify.
The team’s winning submission, entitled “The Backbone Awards,” was both a response to a creative brief for Call of Duty: Warzone and an innovative approach to changing the trajectory of advertising awards.
According to Mark Barry, director of the Minerva program, the students’ submission addressed The One Club “flipping their principles faster than the coins they are chasing.” In turn, the students created a brand-new award, The Backbone Awards, in order to highlight and celebrate work and advertising professionals who do more than just simply sell products and build brands. The Backbone Awards will allow students to award both people and projects in the industry for work that shows the powerful and positive impacts that advertising can have on the industry.
“We’ve won pencils in the past, but this one is extra special,” Barry said. “These five students’ bravery to stand up and call out the organization hosting the awards competition is admirable. And, their submission, The Backbone Awards, is something that will continue to grow and get better over time.”
To learn more about the backbone awards, click here: https://backboneawards.com
To view the team’s winning Young Ones submission, click here: https://vimeo.com/695920123
