| Title | FUTURE DAILY ON APRIL FOOL |
| Brand | METRO PUBLISHING HONG KONG |
| Product / Service | NEWSPAPER |
| Category | A07. Best Use of Digital Media, Including Social Media, Mobile Phones, PDAs etc. |
| Entrant | McCANN WORLDGROUP Hong Kong, HONG KONG |
| Entrant Company: | McCANN WORLDGROUP Hong Kong, HONG KONG |
| Advertising Agency: | McCANN WORLDGROUP Hong Kong, HONG KONG |
| Media Agency: | MEDIABRANDS HONG KONG, HONG KONG |
Credits | |
| Name | Company | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Spencer Wong, Nick Lim | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Executive Creative Director |
| Joseph Mok, Law Chi Hang | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Creative Director |
| Stanley Wong | Thought Starter | |
| Joseph Mok, Gary Lam | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Art Director |
| Law Chi Hang, April Fang, Spring Liu | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Copywriter |
| Zoe Kuo | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Interactive Content Director |
| Jeff Lee, Jeff Wong | Metro Publishing Hong Kong Ltd. | Publication Editor |
| Henry Chu | pill & pillow | Technical Director |
| Keat Mok, Anna Tsang | pill & pillow | Production Programmer |
| James Chan, Eddy Cheung | Surreal Digital Imaging Ltd./In Between | Photo-retoucher |
| Marco Chow, Dck Chan | Wow production/ D-shot | Photographer |
| Yen Lee, Winson Wong, Chris Tam | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Account Service |
| Penelope Yau | McCann Worldgroup (Hong Kong) | Integrated Communications Planner |
| Paul Swee | Studio 13 | Editor |
With self-expression as the only incentive, we received over a thousand articles in just a month, and over 200,000 people visited our website. “It’s a reinvention,” Audrey Eu, Hong Kong Civic Party Leader, on Future Daily. “A disruption,” Claudia Mo, famous media critic, on Future Daily. Not only were we impressed by the number of articles on the site, the contents of the articles were as overwhelming. We received countless articles on topics being constantly silenced in the traditional media, from comments on Taiwan, to the infamous and most censored subject of all times – the June 4th Incident.
Future News + April Fool = Smokescreen for free expression 2 months before April Fool’s Day, we created a website and mobile site “newsin18yrs” and asked people one simple question: What will be making news headlines in 18 years? People were invited to write their own stories on things that matter to their hearts, from politics, social issues, the economy, sports to entertainment. We then published the most voted-for stories on the website, word for word, in a special edition paper that we distributed the public on April Fool’s Day. Our true motive was to give people a lawful channel to express their heartfelt opinions. And we have achieved that successfully by the use of a futuristic theme and an April Fool’s launch. You can’t jail someone over a fictional article on April Fool’s Day, can you?
13 years after the handover, Hong Kong is facing increasing threats to press freedom. So when Metro Daily came to us for an ad campaign, we convinced them of their duty to do something more important, together. We wanted to alarm people the alarming decline of freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and more importantly, we wanted to let people speak freely again without the fear of getting into trouble. With the decline of press freedom in Hong Kong, the Internet has become the only channel where people can still express themselves freely. Our strategy is to find a way to cleverly channel the honest voices from online to the traditional media to effectively alarm people of the threats to press freedom in Hong Kong.