Judge for yourself

There’s an interesting backlash developing online towards the two entries (one is from Malaysia) which won the viral ad competition to become 'Team YouTube', the 39th team competing in the 2009 Young Lions Film Competition.

Over the weekend, Malaysia’s own Adeline Chew and an Israeli entry were deemed winners of the ad competition which this year chose Oxfam as its charity partner. The brief for young creatives across the world was to create a short ad of up to one minute on YouTube to promote their climate change campaign.

Here's Adeline's 'Listen Don't Watch' video



Guy Dayan's 'The YouTube climate thermometer'



Creatives were given 48 hours to submit their ad and then had a further two weeks to make their YouTube ad go viral by any means necessary.

A lot was at stake -- 'Team YouTube' the winners get an all expenses paid trip to Cannes to attend the International Advertising Festival and compete as the 38th team in the prestigious Young Lions Film competition.

PR from Cannes said the competition received 692 entries and over 100,000 votes in two weeks. And that a panel of worldwide creative leaders had selected Adeline and Guy as the winners based upon their ads' creativity, number of views and video ratings.

But, as with most creative judging, not everyone's happy with the results. And it's starting to turn nasty out there in YouTube land.

Check out some of the comments made by YouTube users (or one very free YouTube user) which in most cases accuses the winning videos of lacking creativity, being boring, and in the case of Guy’s video, being an outright stolen idea.

I’ll check back tomorrow to see if the backlash goes the distance for another day… but what do you guys think? A case of sour grapes or do the haters have a point? Or can we chalk this up as another reason why clients should no longer be impressed with an agency's creative award show haul.

FYI the YouTube Contest Judges were:
Rory Sutherland - Vice Chairman, Ogilvy One (UK)
Alexandre Gama - Chief Creative Officer and Founder, NeoGama BBH (Brazil)
Stephane Xiberras - President / Executive Creative Director, BETC Euro RSCG (France)
Nick Law - Executive Vice President, Chief Creative Officer North America, R/GA (USA)
Yuya Furukawa - Executive Creative Director, Dentsu (Japan)
Ariel Abramovici - Copywriter, BBDO Argentina (2008 winner Young Lions Film)
Bruno Acanfora - Art Director, BBDO Argentina (2008 winner Young Lions Film)