• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 22, 2012

The Young Lions maybe young (seven-years-old, in fact), but the brief behind them hasn’t changed since they were introduced at the Cannes Lions awards in 2004, and they’re not going to change in the next seven or even ten years, guaranteed Rei Inamoto, Chief Creative Officer of AKQA, and presenter of the Young Lions awards.

The brief, Inamoto reminded Cannes attendees: “Advertise a product for a brand of your choice in a  way that wouldn’t have been possible five years ago.”

Based on the campaigns Inamoto is presenting, some of them are likely to be the kind of campaigns that could be possible five years from now.

I can’t really hear all of them, because the acoustical set-up in the Cannes press room isn’t that great to begin with, and some journalists keep coming over to turn down the speakers of the Lions presentations so they can make phone calls, chatter, or listen to a much louder and more boisterous presentation going on adjacent to me. Alas, there is no button to control the volume on that one.

Anyway, here is a sum up of a couple of the winners I could hear the presentations for.

The first one was actually kind of brilliant if you ask me. Dubbed “Penguin Soundtracks,” it was developed for Penguin Books and features an app that enables readers of the e-reader copies of books to also listen to supplemental musical tracks associated with the content they’re reading. The app, which is powered by Spotify, might draw on some ominous music during a nerve-wracking part of story, etc. You get the idea. Pretty cool.

Another winner, “Blackout Recorder,” was ingenious and hilarious too. Basically, it’s an app that allows you to “remember everything you cannot” when you go out for an evening of drunken debauchery and are not likely to remember some of the questionable things that took place during your altered state.  The app also enables you to pre-set recorded messages, tweets, photos of your non-drunken, blackout state-of-mind self, so that you don’t get in trouble sending drunken messages, texts, tweets, and worst of all, pictures. Needless to say, this is just the kind of app you’d expect to be created by a Young Lion, though based on the behavior I’ve observed this week in Cannes, it is one that is likely to be used by some older Lions.