Brainyhacks : donating your brains for charity

What was your brain doing on the 27th July?  Anything useful?

We invited teams of creatives and strategists from the digital and advertising industries to volunteer their considerable skills and compete to solve a brief from a not-for-profit organisation in under two hours. Sign up was full in just three days as teams of people rose to the challenge and committed to temporary brain donation to a very worthy cause.  We had teams from Think, UI Centric, Whitewater, Saatchi Grads and a team of brave individuals.

Our client for the night was the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS), who had a brief based on their campaign to end violence against girls and young women.

Rebecca and Jenny from WAGGGS briefed the teams by showing a short film they’d made about the campaign and once the teams had been briefed took questions in an open session.  The starting pistol was fired and our teams were off!

The judges who generously donated their time and considerable skills were Jonny Watson – Associate Creative Director at Dare, Gavin Gordon-Rogers – Interactive Creative Director at Wiedon + Kennedy, James Hilton – Creative Director and co-founder of AKQA, Jez Dutton – Senior strategist at Workclub and Simon Cook (Cookie) – a freelance creative genius.

As you can imagine these guys know a thing or too about big concepts, so as our teams worked away the judges offered advice and guidance to help them along.

Each team had 5 minutes to present their ideas to the client, the judges and the other teams. (Turns out 5 minutes wasn’t enough for most of our teams and our CD Dil ended up looking like a lassoing cowboy doing his wind-it-up signal!) The standard of ideas was excellent especially considering the size of the brief and the very short amount of time the teams had to work on it.

Much drinking and calming of nerves ensued whilst the judges took ages to decide who should win as it was so difficult to make a decision.

James Hilton delivered commendations for the stand out teams and announced that the winning team – Saatchi X Grads had beaten teams of seasoned ad pros to claim ultimate victory!

Their prize for being such clever cookies was membership to the Barbican for a year as well as a big wodge of creative kudos. Not bad for 2 hours work!

Brainyhacks was a bit of an experiment really but we are really pleased with how it went and think it proves that this kind of collaboration with an element of competition can create truly original thinking in a short space of time.

We’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone who took part in the evening and helped make it a success. Plans are underway to progress some of the best ideas and see if they can be made a reality so watch this space.

The next Brainyhacks is September 6th in Brighton as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. If you’re interested in sponsoring this event or the next London event then please get in touch with us.

Dil’s still editing the video – some of his camera work was a bit shoddy (maybe should have stayed off the beers til later eh Dil?) so we’ll post the video separately.

Finally a massive thank you to Rick Barker from Red Banana who gave his time and skills to photograph the night for us. Have a gander at the flickr set.