A total of 32 young talents from 13 European countries have participated over the past weekend in the 10th Creative Express. This edition focused on the #NewEuropeanBauhaus ongoing call for projects that help Europe build beautiful, sustainable, inclusive places to live together.
The New European Bauhaus is an ambitious environmental, economic and cultural project by the European Commission currently on its co-design phase, and ADCE has joined as a partner because we believe in the power of creativity and collaboration to address Europe’s most pressing challenges.
With this in mind, we challenged this year’s participants to work together to develop beautiful, sustainable and inclusive ideas and communication strategies that identify and tackle the reduction of CO2 emissions in diverse areas including sports, education, fashion, packaging, food and beverage, personal hygiene, mobility, building and construction and media and entertainment.
After three intense days of research, brainstorming and ideation, where teams have held virtual work sessions combined with inspiring conversations with mentors and even yoga sessions, the resulting 9 projects were presented online this past Sunday evening via Youtube Live and believe me, they are good! With creatives like this coming through the ranks, there is a lot of reason for hope. Check the campaigns below and judge for yourself:
The first team proposal is a call to the football community to celebrate the Ballon de Carbone instead of the Ballon d’Or. This new Prize would make football players around the world to compete for something more important than goals: reducing their massive carbon footprint. The team identified that no less than 505 tonnes of CO2 were caused by the top 20 football players nominated for the Ballon d’Or in 2019, and just by flying. The trophy would be an actual carbon ball and its size would hopefully get smaller every year if carbon emissions reduced. In addition to the Prize, and to raise awareness of the environmental footprint of the football industry, pitch lines would be painted black.
Topic: Sports. Creative Team: Saana Simander (Finland), Paula Kristiana Petersone (Latvia) and Luis Paladino (Portugal). Mentor: Hannes Böker, Creative Brand Strategist at Red Bull & AlphaTauri, and Board member of Art Directors Club of Europe.
Team 2 proposal is to launch the first non-profit Creative Agency focused on CO2 reduction. After identifying that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions they thought education could play a big role in reducing this footprint. The agency would follow 6 steps to link companies’ needs with students’ ideas. 1: Collect data about companies emissions and identify key problems. 2: Create briefings for students based on those problems. 3: Publish briefings and invite schools and universities to tackle the problems. 4: Collect ideas and transform them into actionable items. 5: Action items are put together as recommendations and provided to the companies. 6. Solutions are made available to the public and shared in social media in case they can be useful for other agents.
Topic: Education. Creative Team: Sanni Wessman (Finland), Estookin Andreen (Estonia), Yanni Hefermann (Germany) and João Elias (Portugal). Mentor: Jamshid Alamuti, multifaceted disruptor, transformational strategist and human development expert at Neural Jam.
To reduce the negative impact of fast fashion and the problem of companies not being transparent about the effects of the industry, team 3 proposes the EU to create Eco Score, a score system that assures the consumer of the impact of the specific clothes they are buying. This legal framework will oblige fashion brands to add the score to all of the clothing labels so consumers would be able to make more conscious decisions when shopping. But the idea doesn’t stop there, because to push this to become a legal obligation to all companies selling in European countries, team 3 calls for a fashion strike. This includes not only stop buying new clothes, but also demonstrating with a repurposed white t-shirt self-customized with the message “Fashion Strike”, signing an online petition, sharing the message through social media, launching a targeted ads campaign that would offer insights to the dark aspects of certain brands alongside news of their latest collections, hijacking the runaways of the most important fashion weeks with Fashion Strike models and creating a VOGUE special issue on Fashion Strike.
Topic: Fashion. Creative Team: André Cabral (Portugal), Lars Schönfelder (Germany) and Nhi Bui (Germany). Mentor: Charlotte Bufler, CCO and founder of The Wunderwaffe.
Here is the fact kickstarting team 4 creativity: The EU wants to reduce packaging waste by 2025, but the reality is that in 2021, most foods are still covered with packaging. The solution is straightforward: Europe needs to go packless to reduce pollution, plastics, emissions, oils and with it, remorse. But how? Team 4 suggestion for the EU is to support the packless store, a store where people would be able to buy their favourite brands without packages. But the idea not only requires the EU to facilitate, “packless store” wants to challenge big brands to rethink their packaging by simply leaving it behind.
Topic: Packaging. Creative Team: Susana Martins (Portugal), Graziella Elschker (Germany), Andreas Palfinger (Austria) and Beatrice Galli (Italy). Mentor: Bruna Gonzalez, award-winning Portuguese Creative Director.
Faced with the necessity to reduce CO2 emissions from meat consumption, team 5 has come up with a radical proposal: a campaign encouraging humans to eat human meat. Gross? Well, probably the dose of reality needed to make you stop eating meat at all. By pushing their idea to the limits: “Is cannibalism the option to save CO2? Eat your friends and save the panet”, this bold campaign achieves to be eye-opening about the cruelty of the meat industry and its impact on CO2 emissions.
Topic: Food. Creative Team: Lara Ala-Olla (Finland), Irene López Muñoz (Spain), Asia Mier Villar (Czech Republic) and Imad El Rayess (Switzerland). Mentor: Erik Kessels, Dutch artist, curator and communication designer and partner at KesselsKramer in Amsterdam/London/LA.
Doing their research on the impact of personal hygiene products and habits on CO2 emissions, team 6 identified an uncomfortable truth: hot showers are no good, not only for the planet but for our skin too. The good news is, this doesn’t mean we have to switch hot showers with freezing ones, but reducing the temperature to manageable levels can be a solution. How to control the temperature is therefore a challenge team 6 proposed to solve with a shampoo cap that turns from blue to red when the water you use is too hot. This technology could be developed by a big brand like Dove, but shared with any other brands that want to use it with an open patent.
Topic: Personal Hygiene. Creative Team: Vladislav Minchev (Ukraine), Karla Ribelus (Estonia) and Gisela Castañé (Spain). Mentor: Patsy Koeppel-Haslinger, Creative Director at Gruppe am Park Austria.
The construction industry causes 40% of CO2 emissions worldwide and team 7 wondered how we as individuals can act to contribute to reduce these emissions, especially when decisions affecting this industry are so far out of reach to the common citizen. Their solution? Investing in sustainable building projects. How? With a cool app called Greeen that helps identify these projects and track your investments. An interesting idea to make your money and the world greener, that would surely be supported by many “greenfluencers”.
Topic: Building and Construction. Creative Team: Alina Wessendorf (Germany), Cillian Kenny (Ireland), Mireia Pascual (Spain) and Rita Raziünaite (Lithuania). Mentor: Irina Metneva, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Vandog Agency.
Ecological issues are so worrying that tackling them with humour is a big bonus point. Team 8 identified a little-known problem with a simple and readily available solution in the area of mobility that could make a big difference in reducing emissions. Under inflated tyres increase your vehicle’s drag, which increases fuel consumption and with it, greenhouse emissions. To tackle this problem and raise awareness of its simple solution, team 8 has come up with a catchy campaign called “Check your nipples”, nipples referring here to the name commonly used to describe the pressure valves that are used to pump up the tires of a vehicle. Their motto: Check your nipples, pump it up and save the planet!
Topic: Mobility. Creative Team: Ihor Havrush (Ukraine), Nina Urminska (Czech Republic) and Jessica Rees (Switzerland). Mentor: David Torrents, a multidisciplinary designer with expertise in commercial and non-commercial projects, which are often closely aligned with culture.
Reviewing assumptions and examining our daily habits is a good starting point, and what got team 9 with a very relevant idea to reduce a carbon footprint that is still not very much discussed, our heavy data usage. The team identified that smartphone usage can be as polluting as the vilified flight industry and what is more worrying, that people are not aware that data usage contributes to CO2 emissions. Their idea: a smartphone software add-on that counts your data usage in CO2 emissions and that comes with a series of options to help you reduce it, including screen Greensavers that remind you how well, or not, you are doing in staying away from your phone, an eco-streaming option to reduce the quality and data usage linked to watching audiovisual material on your phone and even a reverse phone bill that companies could promote, paying back customers for the data they didn’t use at the end of a billing cycle.
Topic: Media & Entertainment. Creative Team: Ieva Vitola (Latvia), Claudia Venturini (Italy), Eva Redmond (Ireland) and Laurenz Breier (Germany). Mentor: HP Albrecht, Creative Express director and Partner at The Wunderwaffe.