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VCU Brandcenter Students, Alumni Win at Cannes Festival

Nadia Hyder
Marybeth Ledesma
Nick Maschmeyer
Matthew Runde
Chris Sheldon

Tom Gresham
University Public Affairs
(804) 828-6051
tmgresham@vcu.edu

6/28/2012

Students from the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter were among the winners of the AKQA Future Lions competition at the Cannes Lions 59th International Festival of Creativity held last week in Cannes, France. A number of Brandcenter alumni also picked up prizes in the general competitions.

Christopher Sheldon, Marybeth Ledesma, Nadia Hyder, Matthew Runde and Nick Maschmeyer were honored in the Future Lions contest at the festival, which attracts thousands of members of the global creative communications industries. Cannes is the largest international award show in the advertising industry. The Future Lions competition honors the best advertising work from students. Entrants were required to advertise a product from a global brand in a way that could not have been done five years ago.

The VCU Brandcenter team created an innovative video advertising Microsoft’s “Bing Automatic,” an organic search tool. The video can be viewed at http://www.brandcenter.vcu.edu/11.aspx. The winning piece involved contributions from students from each of the VCU Brandcenter’s five tracks – art direction (Ledesma), copywriting (Sheldon), communications strategy (Maschmeyer), creative technology (Runde) and creative brand management (Hyder).

In addition to the current students’ winning entry, several VCU Brandcenter alumni were winners in Cannes competitions. They included:

About VCU and the VCU Medical Center

Virginia Commonwealth University is a major, urban public research university with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located in downtown Richmond, VCU enrolls more than 31,000 students in 223 degree and certificate programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-eight of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU’s 13 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University comprise the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.