The twenty-fourth International DRAC Novell Festival, organised by the Advertising Business Association, has drawn to a close after seeing 800 advertising campaigns submitted to the competition and nearly 1,000 attendees attend the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC Barcelona) during the two days of the festival. A number of institutions took part in the Festival by submitting their proposals, including the most important Public Relations and Advertising faculties in Spain, art and design schools and international universities. The competition aims to reward work created by Advertising students and open up the opportunity for them to present these creations to the business world.

Nine award categories

A project based on creating a campaign for Infojobs by students from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Ventura Javierre and Pau Dalmau, won the DRAC Novell de Oro (gold) award in the “creativity in 24 hours” category. This is the Festival’s most emblematic prize, considering participants have just one day to create a strategy and submit it to the competition. In the same category, former UIC Barcelona students Edu Prats and Pablo Pérdigo went home with the DRAC Novell de Plata (silver). The GranPrix Complot award went to the project by Mónica Martínez from the Brother Madrid creative school.

Finally, as for the awards from the classic categories, Brother Madrid took home the most with a total of seven.

The jury for this year’s competition featured Gabriel Garcia de Oro, creative director of Ogilvy; Ruben Diaz, creative director of AMT Comunicación; Victor Arriazu, creative director of VMLY&R Barcelona; Marta Oms from OBB Comunicación; Sergi Pérez, creative director of DDB; Bea Osorio from Ms&MrMeet and Roger Sendra, managing director of Dentsu.

Digital creativity

Under the slogan “The Ace of Creativity”, this year’s Festival focused on creativity in the digital world and included conferences, workshops and a round table featuring professionals from the communication and advertising sector. The list of experts who took part in DNI21 includes Victor Arriazu from VMLY&R Barcelona; Belén Pueyo from Gestmusic; Arnau Peidro from McCann Health Barcelona; Andrea Mingorance from Bakery Group, and Araceli Escobedo from Urban Sports Club.

The rector of UIC Barcelona, Alfonso Méndiz; the president of the Advertising Business Association, Álvaro Montoliu and the director general of the Catalan Government, Ignasi Genovès, extended an institutional welcome to all participants. Méndiz confirmed that UIC Barcelona will also host the Festival next year.

The International DRAC Novell creativity festival is unique in that it is organised by students of the host university, in this case, the UIC Barcelona Faculty of Communication Sciences. A total of four working committees made up of 40 volunteer students from the University coordinated the organisation of the event, with support from the Advertising Business Association. The Festival itself was set up in 1997 and supported by the Catalan Government. Infojobs and Complot have also collaborated on this year’s Festival.