YoungGuns International Award
YoungGuns International Award (also referenced as YoungGuns Award and YGAward) is an annual global award show for young and emerging creative talent in the advertising and communication industry. The award recognizes the best young commercial practitioners and students across the fields of advertising, communication design, digital creative, advertising media and public relations from around the world. Entrants into the award must be aged 30 or under. Entrants for the award compete for gold, silver and bronze awards across 8 divisions and 40 categories. Every year, two ultimate winners will be determined and named YoungGun of the Year  and YoungGun Student of the Year. History. Kristian Barnes, Jason Williams, and Michael Kean (CEO of market-leading global creative recruitment firm FBI Recruitment) founded the YoungGuns Award in 2001 from Sydney, Australia with the goal of recognizing and promoting upcoming talent rather than rewarding years of experience. They noted that the reason for starting the award was their frustration that major awards at the time were typically won by well established individuals within the industry. Innovation. The YoungGuns Award show introduced a number of innovations in the award category. It was the first international award show focused solely on  young and emerging talent, participants had to be under 30 to qualify for entry. It was first international award to produce an advertising campaign for its call of entries (see below). It was the first to offer prizes to the winners, for the YoungGun of the Year it was a cash prize as well as a place on the following years jury, and for the YoungGun Student of the Year it was a work placement with an international agency (Leo Burnett). It was the first to take the winners and finalists work on a travelling exhibition (including Australia, NZ, UK , US, HK, India Singapore, South Africa and Japan). It also introduced 20Guns - a peer voting system where the top voted work would be entered free of charge into the YoungGuns Award Call for entry. YoungGuns was the first international award to produce an advertising campaign for its call of entries. The campaigns are renowned for being controversial. Most notable include "Peak Early" which focused on child prodigies; "Quit in Style" which allowed anyone to upload content such as videos and feedback to demonstrate how they would quit their jobs; 'Worth the Pain' which encouraged creatives to push through to greatness  but told them in detail about the effect it would have on their bodies and "Hardly Legal" a porn inspired tribute to creativity. Despite the controversy the yearly campaigns have proven to be quite appealing to the creative industry. Some campaigns have managed to receive recognition in other creative awards such as the One Club New Zealand Grande Axis and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The call for entries campaigns are usually created by selective advertising agencies or creative collaborations from all around the world. Some of the past Call for Entry campaign creators included Droga5, The Glue Society, Taxi , Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and Saatchi & Saatchi (New Zealand). Jury panel. The jury consists of an international panel of over a world class Creative Leader (2014 Jury Chairman announced as Dave Douglas - Partner / ECD of Anomaly Toronto), the best up & coming creative stars from the majority of global advertising agency networks, as well as the previous year's winner - the "YoungGuns of the Year". YoungGuns of the Decade. In 2010 YoungGuns announced the best young individual talent, agencies and advertising schools based on awarded entries from its first 10 years. The YoungGun of the Decade was Jeff Anderson (Goodby Silverstein  & Partners, San Francisco), the YoungGun Agency of the Decade was BBDO and the Advertising School of the Decade was Miami Ad School, Europe.