Ad Stars has chosen the winners of this year’s New Stars Ad Competition for junior advertising professionals who have less than three years’ experience or are aged under 30.

• Zach Lim & Villarica Manuel from Wunderman Thompson Philippines won Gold for their BusanWave campaign.

New Stars helps young professionals to further their career by competing with 33 teams from around the world. This year, the teams had just 24-hours to respond to the brief to come up with a ground-breaking social media promotional plan to attract more international tourists to Busan – and boost the image of the city as a global tourism destination.

“The teams had a day to write a reverse brief and create a presentation board or video that sold their idea. Overall, given the quick turnaround time, the results were seriously impressive. There was some excellent research, thinking and craft demonstrated – some bold stand-out ideas and a few concepts that Busan tourism should really consider running,” stated Kim Pick, executive creative director at VMLY&R New Zealand, who led the New Stars jury panel.

“Busan Wave stood out as a big platform idea that recognised the Korean Wave craze, and created a new sub-genre of Busan Wave – a more laid-back, beachy version of Korean Wave that could apply to music, drama, art and more. It didn’t just give a feeling for what the Busan experience would be like – it actually helped set a vision for tourism in the city.”

• The two Silver-winning teams are Haehyun Lee and Uyeon Jeong from Daehong Communications, South Korea, and Noriaki Tanimura and Mai Kaneda from McCann Health Japan.

 “The Silver-winning team from Japan produced a stand-out piece of crazy left field thinking that had the judges laughing out loud,” Pikc noted.

“It focused on making an unlikely hero of the Busan slime eel – and recruiting a team of slime fanatics from around the world to descend on the city to study it (and enjoy it as a delicacy). It was bold and mad enough to actually be highly social and successful.

“The Silver-winning Korean team had an idea that could be packaged up and sold tomorrow – it was an end-to-end roll out for an app Meoggo (a clever play on words meaning both ‘what is it?’ and ‘eat’) where Busan taxi drivers could recommend all the best places to eat in the city. It was well-thought through and highly finessed.”

• John Bellarmine Javier and Henry Glo from Nuworks Interactive Labs in the Philippines won Bronze.

There were also three Crystal winners from Malaysia, Taiwan and Australia.

• Larissa Loh and Vickknesh Raj from Leo Burnett Malaysia; Jack Hsu and Easy Tsai from Wunderman Thompson Taipei; and Fiona McLeod and Emily Field from BMF Australia.