D&AD partners with Kyoorius to launch design awards in India

Mumbai: D&AD (Design and Art Direction), the British educational charity that promotes excellence in advertising and design, partnered with Kyoorius, a not-for-profit organization set up by Transasia Fine Papers, and the International Advertising Association (India chapter) to launch the Kyoorius Awards in India on Friday.

add_main_imageThis is D&AD’s first partnership with an organization. It has representatives in key cities such as Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Shanghai.

“We want to create a real D&AD presence in key creative cities around the world—Mumbai is clearly high on that list,” said Tim Lindsay, chief executive officer for D&AD, adding that it would like to see more entries and more members of D&AD from India. NextMAds

Toward this end, all Kyoorius Award winners from India will get to enter any of their work for the D&AD awards for free. The D&AD Awards, known for the prestigious Yellow Pencil prize, attracts close to 20,000 entries, compared with the 30,000 or so that the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival receives.

“We are trying to fuel a design movement in India and this award show is one initiative where you can help build accreditation for the designer to showcase their work to the corporate buyer, and that is one of the goals we have,” said Rajesh Kejriwal, founder CEO, Kyoorius.

Lindsay said: “At a time when global creative industries face continuing tough economic challenges, delivering outstanding creative work worthy of an award can be a valuable point of differentiation.”

The Kyoorius Awards will be announced at the 9th annual Kyoorius Designyatra in Goa on 29 August. Unlike other awards that don’t encourage unpublished work, the Kyoorius Awards have a category for this called Design Craft.

Goafest, India’s annual advertising industry awards, attracted criticism recently for entries that were allegedly “scam ads” including the infamous Ford Figo ads by JWT India. Scam ads are created with the sole intent of winning awards and not to be used in campaigns.

“Sometimes, creative people do work which may not be accepted by the client for several reasons,” said Kejriwal. “Just because it wasn’t accepted (by the client), why should it not be celebrated?” sixthMAds

The Kyoorius awards may look to expand categories to include areas such as fashion and architecture, besides other geographical territories next year.