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Creative A Week in Creative

A Week in Creative: Nestlé’s LGBT+ anti-pollution ad and Fifa’s C4 diversity winner

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By Imogen Watson, Senior reporter

April 28, 2021 | 5 min read

Welcome to A Week in Creative, your one-stop-shop for creative news. This is an extract from The Drum Creative Briefing, which you can subscribe to here if you’d prefer it in your inbox once a week.

Week in Creative:

EA Sports’s Channel 4 Diversity Award-winning ad focuses on a lack of British Asian professional footballers

First things first. As part of The Drum’s new Creative Works round-up, each week we celebrate the 10 best ads from our Creative Works section, asking our readers to vote for their favorite.

And, after counting up the votes, the pick of this week is an absurd ad by Filipino bakery chain Julie’s Bakeshop. When a young man decides to ’auntie shame’ two ladies at the gym, a baker turns him into a pandesal – a bread roll that is popular in the Philippines.

Next up, Channel 4 has, since 2016, been actively enticing brands to up the representation of diverse groups in their ads with its annual Diversity in Advertising Award.

Previous themes have included disability, mental health, the portrayal of women in the media and the LGBTQ+ community, while this year’s challenge for brands and agencies was to present an authentic portrayal of UK Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) cultures.

This year’s winner is EA Sports, with its spot for the massively popular football title Fifa 21. The ad features Premier League star and newly-signed EA Sports Fifa ambassador Hamza Choudhury and explores the Midnight Ramadan League – a grassroots football team set up to help those who struggle to play during their Ramadan fast, with matches kicking off after iftar and before suhoor.

Meanwhile, you’ll most certainly have seen Dove’s latest campaign circulating online being widely commended for tackling a topic that doesn’t get enough airtime – the harmfulness of filter and retouching apps to young girls.

Widely available, the apps encourage children to stare intently at their own reflection, but instead of admiring their perfect imperfections, they are given tools to ‘fix’ them, playing around with the dimensions of their face until they look like a Bratz doll.

And so Dove and its long-term ad agency Ogilvy decided something had to be done and in a follow up to its viral ’Evolution’ campaign, ’Reverse Selfie’ goes backwards to show how children use digital effects to change how they look.

Also having implications for our mental health is the pandemic – so much so that the Royal College of Psychiatrists has called it a “mental health crisis”. As a direct result of the pandemic, more than half of young men have felt negative about their body.

Scrolling through Instagram while the body positivity movement is positively thriving, there is a distinct lack of male voices in the conversation.

And so Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm) has teamed up with Instagram on a body-positive series called ’Calm Body Talks’. It features a number of famous faces talking about sensitive subjects including ’bigorexia’, height and hair worries and body acceptance.

Calm

Lastly this week, plastic’s ability to last forever is both a blessing and a curse. For single-use plastic, like straws and cups, it’s most definitely the latter. And so Nestlé’s Brazilian chocolate brand Nescau has brought out a crucial ad that beautifully tackles both sustainability and LGBT+ rights.

Using a split-screen technique, on one side you see a child called Safira growing up over 20 years, from an adorable baby to the powerful trans woman she becomes.

On the other, a plastic straw that has been caught up in some coral. It stays exactly the same throughout the ad, apart from the aquatic backdrop that it’s nestled within. The ad ends with Safira removing the straw after 20 years. “If the straw doesn't change, we change the straw,“ reads the ad, before highlighting how Nescau will now adopt a paper straw.

For more creative news, please visit The Drum’s new creativity hub on the website or drop in at The Drum’s Creative Works – the home of creative from all around the globe. You can also subscribe to The Drum’s creative newsletter or browse our round-up here.​

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