A video by Quirk telling Nelson Mandela’s life story in Lego, and petitioning the toy brick manufacturer to create a “Madiba Freedom Fighter”, is the winner of YouTube Film Hack – a competition for video creators in South Africa to produce inspiring marketing content for YouTube.
The YouTube Film Hack competition, run by Google in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, invited entrants to use global icon Nelson Mandela’s legacy as the creative springboard to produce innovative, engaging and interactive YouTube content. Participants received a standard brief and a limited amount of time to create a YouTube campaign that would inspire South Africans across the country to follow in the footsteps of the much-loved Madiba.
Quirk’s winning team won a trip to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in June.
"Quirk delivered a unique and thought-provoking submission capturing the most popular moments in Madiba’s life using Lego – a format that is nostalgic and appeals equally to younger and older generations,” says Danielle Melville, director of communications at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
"In general, the winning campaigns showed the power of using social media to engage the public around the important topic of what it means to live the Nelson Mandela legacy, that is both relevant and tangible.”
The two joint runner-up videos were created by teams from McCann and Y&R. Y&R’s black-and-white video shows powerful images of what we can do with our hands, playing on Mandela’s challenge to the world, “it’s in your hands now”.
McCann appealed to YouTube’s young audience (70% of South African YouTube users are aged 18 to 34), highlighting how Mandela was lauded by the likes of Lady Gaga and Pharell Williams, and calling on them to “be part of the Madiba clique” and change the world.
“Video is a powerful way for marketers to engage the hearts and minds of consumers and our winners demonstrated how that can be done in an effective and innovative way – in a very short period of time. YouTube Film Hack also reminds us of the immense pool of creative talent we have in South Africa, and we’d like to celebrate that,” says Elizma Nolte, country marketing manager for South Africa.
The competition submissions had to include a short YouTube film, as well as an advertisement to drive traffic to the video. The three top submissions ran on YouTube for a week and the number of views they received was one of the judging criteria. Other criteria included the innovation and interactivity of the videos.
For more info please contact:
Danielle Melville, Nelson Mandela Foundation, DanielleM@nelsonmandela.org
Emma Hall, Africa Practice, ehall@africapractice.com
Hashtag: #LivingTheLegacy