NEW YORK, USA — Awards show New York Festivals is thrilled to announce “The [uncertain] Four Seasons” created by advertising agency Jung von Matt AG Germany as the 2022 Genius 100 Inspiration Award winner. This prestigious award, in partnership with the Genius 100 Foundation (G100) honors outstanding purpose-driven creative work that inspires action to create impact.
This year’s Genius 100 Executive Jury included the late Genius 100 Global Ambassador and Inspiration Award Chairman, James Caan, Jose Miguel Sokoloff, Sima Simar, and Don Tapscott.
“We are honored to partner with New York Festivals Advertising Awards to present the G100 ‘Work of Genius’ Inspiration Award. We (G100) are Inspired by Einstein,’ and this very special award celebrates truly inspired, imaginative work which demands attention and fosters undeniable and significant impact. Now more than ever, we must recognize how much we can gain from embracing creativity to influence positive change,” emphasized Hilarie Viener, CEO of the Genius 100 Foundation US.
“The [uncertain] Four Season” was created by Jung von Matt AG through a partnership between the UN Act Now, digital design agency AKQA, musicians and scientists from around the world, composer Huge Crosthwaite and Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub.
The award-winning campaign combined music theory and a climate algorithm to generate variations of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons composition that represent the dramatic environmental climate changes affecting each season. The algorithm altered the music score to account for predicted changes in rainfall, biodiversity, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events as laid out in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. The composition variations portrayed a future where the world failed to act decisively on global warming.
“For us, the challenge and the struggle when talking about climate change is how we translate data into the lived experience. We believe that we need to humanize climate science and climate data so that we can connect more with people. The [Uncertain] Four Seasons is our emotional attempt to show climate data in a new way that people will not only understand but feel. After all, we’ve seen all the climate crisis pictures, watched all the climate documentaries, and seen all the data science graphs – our hope is that by reflecting the risks of climate change in music – as the one universal language everybody speaks – we can help people experience what a radically new aesthetic and lived experience might feel like. Finally, we wanted to offer something that local communities could collectively rally around, discuss, and take direct action through their leaders or the UN’s ActNow platform,” shared Joachim Kortlepel, ECD of Jung von Matt AG, Germany
To close out an incredible year, last but surely not the least, NYF also announced this week Vox Media’s “The Beauty of Blackness” for client Sephora as the 2022 SeeHer Lens Award winner.
The SeeHer Lens Award is a partnership between New York Festivals, The Female Quotient (The FQ), and the ANA and honors best-in-class creative film work submitted that exemplifies gender equality and accurate portrayals of women and girls in advertising.
The 2022 SeeHer Lens Award winner “The Beauty of Blackness” is a feature-length documentary produced by Epic Stories the branded storytelling arm of Vox Media and Creative Production in collaboration with Sephora, Digitas, and Ventureland. The feature shines a light on the resurgence of the first cosmetics brand to cater to black women, Fashion Fair Cosmetics, as the company’s new owners, Desiree Rogers and Cheryl Mayberry-McKissack brought it back from bankruptcy.
“It’s an honor to be selected for the NYF “SeeHer Lens” Award. We are proud to have partnered with Sephora and Digitas who see the value in sharing this important story and shining a light on the inequalities of the beauty industry, in an effort to move it forward. By leaning on true, inspirational stories, like the one told for Fashion Fair in this film, brands have the opportunity to power real change,” commented Kiana Moore, co-director of The Beauty of Blackness and the VP of content production, head of Epic Digital at Vox Media.
The winning feature documentary chronicles Fashion Fair’s legacy: both its rise and fall, and through Fashion Fair’s tumultuous and triumphant story, and examines the beauty industry’s long history of discrimination, while also highlighting a new generation pioneering the future for Black women working in beauty.
