Speaking about the selection process, jury president Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, said she encouraged the jury to exercise extreme cynicism when it came to the judging process. ‘We interrogated every entry, especially about whether it came from a place of authenticity and integrity. Where it came from a brand, was there a very good reason for the brand to be doing this. And also in terms of the commitment to genuine long-term sustainability in terms of the impact and effectiveness.’
Of the winner, she noted: ‘Transition Body Lotion represents a fantastic demonstration of how driving social change is good business.’ She also praised the commitment of the R&D process, and the focus on co-creation with the community and how it made them feel seen heard.
Gallop also praised the diverse jury, stating it was a model for progress, ‘Our jury was composed of nine women and one man, we had queer representation, trans representation, disability representation, mother with a newborn baby representation. What that resulted in was a jury whose members were completely open minded, who were willing to listen and actually hear what each fellow jury member had to say in terms of their individual perspectives. What this meant was that we sat down at 9am yesterday to award, and we had unanimously agreed on every award and wrapped the whole thing up before midday. And I want you to take away from that how when the face of our industry is the face that is represented by the Glass Lion jury today, how much more speedy, efficient, productive, effective, creative and infinitely happier our industry will be.’
She had strong words for adland with regards to gender equality, ‘It’s worth noting that live presentations showed us that while what was being presented were wonderful ways to solve gender inequality, the presentation dynamics where there was one female presenter, and one male presenter showed our own industry has a long way to go in applying that to itself.’
When asked to elaborate by Contagious in the Q&A, she said: ‘There were several cases where one presenter was male and one presenter was female, where we saw unfortunate gender inequality dynamics, in the operation of the presentation in terms of the man talking over the woman, the man physically moving and blocking the woman with his body while presenting, using a woman as a prop, and generally dynamics that we as a jury were very unhappy about witnessing. It indicated that all of the creative work that our industry does on gender equality to drive gender equality is not being replicated in terms of the way this industry actually operates. It’s important to say that we absolutely took that emotional response out of our consideration, we awarded entrance on merit alone.’
She concluded that not enough has changed and there is a lot more work to be done in adland, ‘I said 10 years ago, when I went on stage to present the Glass Lion awards, “I want you to take a long hard look at yourself, at your agency, at your holding company at your creative department at your team and ask yourself, would we award ourselves the Glass Lion”. And 10 years later, based on what we saw operating on stage and to be frank, what we have heard going on at this festival still today, we are not seeing gender equality being bought into by our industry as a whole.’
