Ideas that
change behaviour.
For teams whose intervention is a message, a campaign, a service design or a brand. Judges look for sharp consumer insight, originality of execution, and a measurable, ethical path to behaviour change.
Three deliverables.
Pick one specific behaviour in a specific population. “Get teenagers to read more” is too broad. “Help year-10 girls finish at least one long-form non-fiction book before exams” is the level of specificity we ask for.
A campaign artefact, a service prototype, a script that has actually been used. The artefact does not need to be polished — it needs to have been tried with real people.
However small: ten people who behaved differently, a pre/post survey, a teacher who can speak to what changed. We grade honesty harder than scale.
Who you’ll work with.
The Brand & Communication track is led by Ben Adeyemi (Studio Northbank) in London and by Carla Vélez (former planner at Wieden+Kennedy New York) in the Americas. Hong Kong teams are mentored by a rotating pool of senior strategists from BBH Asia-Pacific and Edelman APAC.
Each team is paired with two mentors for the eleven-week programme: one strategist and one creative director. Cross-track sessions with Digital & AI teams happen every fortnight.
Selected work, 2024–25.
A school-led campaign re-zoning library spaces and lunch periods to reduce social-media use during academic stress windows. Pilot ran across four schools.
A voice-led peer-counselling line and accompanying campaign that doubled help-seeking among year-10 girls in a six-week pilot.
A re-fillable water-bottle programme negotiated with five cafés around three Bronx schools, paired with a wayfinding poster series.
Name the person, the action, the proof.
Brand & Communication is for teams whose intervention is a message, a service script, a spatial change, or a campaign. The artefact can be analog. Process: audience and behaviour defined by week 2, a small live test by week 6 (a poster that went up, a conversation that was had, a desk that was moved), measurement notes by week 8, defence rehearsal in weeks 9–10. Juries are allergic to mood-boards that never left Figma.
What good looks like: a named audience (year-10 girls in one school, café customers on one block, library users in exam term), a single behaviour, a reason existing messages fail, and some evidence — even ugly evidence — that your version moved anyone. “Quiet Hours,” “Talk to Tina” and “Free Refills” from 2025 are on this page because they were small enough to be true. What fails: a brand identity for a fictional NGO; a social-media plan with follower targets and no users; a film that is moving and unattached to any next action.
You will be asked, in the room, who you spoke to and what you would stop doing if the measurement came back flat. Prepare that sentence. Creative craft still matters — a muddy poster is hard to defend — but craft without a behaviour is scored as communication, not as solution. If the real work is a piece of software, use the Digital track; do not hide an app inside a campaign because the visuals are stronger.