Overlooked Work from Asia

We took a look at all our markets in Asia Pacific today, and I saw some good pieces underscored and overlooked by a jury bereft of delegates from the east. It made me a bit angry that the campaign below, from Leo Burnett Mumbai scored rather low, as I think it's a brilliant outdoor/print campaign that would really capture people's attention in India. The folks at Campaign India understood it. Take a look at the images below. Michael Conrad once said that great advertising makes "simple, authentic, haunting observations of life." The way these billboard pieces address class and money issues through imagery is really quite haunting. A holey sock and ill-fitting pants adorn the man in the first image, but he's got shoes of authority. The second image is entitled "malnourished" and feature a clearly unhealthy woman's feet in some very girly footwear. The third is a thief in handcuffs wearing expensive hiking boots. The tag line on all of them reads: "for the love of shoes." I think it's brilliant work because I can't stop thinking about what these shoes represent in a society that takes status symbols seriously... Perhaps its my liberal guilt twitching, a consequence of living well around wretched poverty for much of my life... I don't know. But if I saw this on a billboard in India, it would stay with me...