GLOBAL: A campaign from Yasmin, a contraceptive pill brand, which used mobile “mini-movies” to provide accessible sexual education to young people in order to help reduce China’s high rate of abortions, won the Best in Show award at the 2017 Global Smarties Awards from the Mobile Marketing Association.

The campaign, from PHD China, was built around the observation that talking about sex in China is considered taboo. What’s more, information about contraception is absent from school curricula; unsafe sex is prevalent and attitudes are immature.

Abortions are very common with the data indicating that over 50% of Chinese women have had more than one abortion. With its clever mobile strategy, the campaign resulted in a 28% year on year increase in sales of the Yasmin pill.

The North American Best in Show award went to Dove’s Dear Media, by SapientRazorfish, which targeted issues of beauty and body empowerment by building an algorithm that detected sexist comments in the media.

The strategy was driven by the insight that, even at the largest global sporting events, female athletes are still often discussed in terms of how they look and not just their performance.

With the help of the algorithm, the sexist quotes were then distributed via social to draw attention to the everyday sexism of the coverage.

In total, 33 campaigns won awards with 14 Golds, in addition to the two Best in Show; 10 Silvers and seven Bronzes were also awarded. The full list of winners can be seen here and WARC subscribers can also read all the winning papers.

As the winning campaign indicated, submissions from the Asia Pacific and China were strong, with the region claiming seven Gold awards in addition to the Best in Show, including campaigns for McDonald’s, Nike, and Maybelline.

Gold-award winning campaigns in the US included electronics company Samsung, and media brand Warner Bros. Elsewhere, Shell won a Gold in EMEA with an innovative mobile payment app for connected cars.

The winners were announced at a ceremony in New York last night.

Data sourced from MMA; additional content by WARC staff