Gigi Rice and Elle Bellwood, creatives at Hope and Glory, have today become the first ever UK winners of the Cannes Young PR Lions competition. The team from Ireland, Orna Clarke and Lughan Deane won Silver, and from Taiwan, Ya Ting Chien and Tze Yu Yeh claimed Bronze.

Elle and Gigi won the UK heat as freelancers earlier in the year, beating 60 other teams. At the global final, they competed against 24 national winners to be crowned the world’s best. Teams had 24 hours to create a global campaign based on a detailed brief from One Young World.

The brief challenged competitors to create a campaign that would promote young voices in conversations around climate change. The winning campaign idea was “Time for Action” – a strategy to target global leaders and politicians with a series of sustainable luxury watches.

The other five teams make the final eight-team shortlist were: Croatia, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, USA.

The previous gold winners hail from Japan in 2019, China in 2018 and Hungary in 2017.

PRCA Director General Francis Ingham MPRCA said:

“Congratulations to Elle and Gigi on making history as the first ever UK winners of the Young PR Lions competition. It’s been inspiring to see so many brilliant young teams from around the world compete and demonstrate the growing power of public relations.”

Gigi and Elle said:

“We are utterly over the moon to have won the UK’s first gold PR Cannes Young Lion in our initial year in the industry. We’d particularly like to thank Hope and Glory and Candace Kuss for all their support in this round and cannot wait for Cannes Condensed next week where we get to finally meet (and buy a few drinks) for the incredible people in PR who have inspired us through this last year. It’s officially coming home!”