An Arab Lion made its way to this year's Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, confirming worldwide recognition of the region's communication industry.
Stepping onto international stage, the region also won a bronze award in the media category announced yesterday by the Cannes Lions jury.
A regional campaign in Arabic, Leo Burnett Beirut's "Khede Kasra", stood among 15 public relations Lions, the new category at Cannes Lions this year.
The winning campaign was commissioned by the Hariri Foundation to address the imbalance of gender roles in Lebanese society through its Women Empowerment Programme.
The agency chose to tackle gender inequality in the Arabic language. A kasra in Arabic language is a punctuation mark that indicates feminine gender, as opposed to fatha for the masculine.
In the campaign, words that would otherwise be addressed to men by default, were altered with a kasra accent, making them addressed to women.
The campaign swept the most gold awards at the Dubai Lynx Awards 2009, in Dubai, last March. The team walked away with five gold medals including integrated category, Best Use of Mixed Media, Best Use of Ambient Media: Small Scale, Fundraising, Charities, Appeals, Non-Profit Organisations sub category gold in media category and another gold in interactive advertising.
At Dubai Lynx, Leo Burnett collected one Grand Prix and six gold awards, of a total 22 awards.
Bechara Mouzannar, Executive Creative Director Lebanon and Levant for Leo Burnett, said: "Winning a Lion in Cannes illustrates our commitment to the creation of big ideas that can change the way people think, in this case about gender inequality in Lebanon.
"The team was committed to ensuring that the imbalance of gender roles in Lebanese society was addressed and the gold award is testament to the hard work, creativity and integrated approach that we took. We believe we made a real difference to people's lives and are incredibly proud of that fact."
Starcom MediaVest won the bronze medal for its "Galaxy Falling in Love" campaign, also a winner of Media Grand Prix Award at the Dubai Lynx 2009.
Meanwhile, Cannes Lions continued announcing the winners in different categories, calling out the Media, Outdoor and Radio Lions.
The jury shortlisted 211 entries out of the 1,840 and awarded 122 winners. Overall 20 gold, 30 silver and 71 bronze Lions were awarded in the Media category.
In the Outdoor category 69 were selected as winners from 4,498 entries. The Outdoor media jury awarded 11 golds, 21 silvers and 35 bronze awards
The Outdoor Grand Prix was awarded to TBWA\HUNT\LASGARIS, Johannesburg for The Zimbabwean campaign "Fight the Regime", "Cheaper than Money", "Trillion Dollar Billboard", "Z$250 000 000" and "Wallpaper".
Radio saw a total of 1,153 entries and 33 winners were honoured from a shortlist of 167. Trophies in the Radio category included one gold, two silvers and 11 bronze.
Network BBDO of Johannesburg won the Radio Grand Prix for the "Dancer", "Dog" and "Ferret" campaign for Virgin airlines.
Media Agency of the Year was given to Dentsu Tokyo, Japan. Also announced were the gold winners of the Young Lions Media Competition, which went to the Australian team made up of Lauren Cassar, Communications Strategist, and Tristan Burrell, Media Planner, both from Universal McCann.
The Media jury was chaired by Nick Brien, President and CEO, Mediabrands; Outdoor was led by Akira Kagami, Executive Officer and Global Executive Creative Director of Dentsu; Matthew Bull, Chief Creative Officer of Lowe Worldwide was the jury president for the radio category.
A new distribution channel for world's well-known confectionery product, Nestle's Kit Kat, turned out to be a winner of the Media Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
JWT Japan, Kit Kat's agency, created "Kit Kat Mail", a postcard-like product sold only at the post office that could be mailed to students as an edible good-luck charm.
The idea originated from the Japanese translation of Kit Kat, Kitto Katso, which means "surely win" and the tradition of sending students good luck wishes before they take tough higher-education entrance exams.
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