TBWA'S JOHN HUNT TO CHAIR TV JURY AT ADFEST 2007

Adfest, the Asia Pacific Advertising Festival, has confirmed that John Hunt, worldwide creative director of TBWA, will be the Chairman of the TV jury for next year's four day festival at Pattaya Beach, Thailand from 14-17 March.
Piyush Pandey, executive CD of Ogilvy & Mather India, will chair the Print jury and Linda Locke, regional ECD of Leo Burnett will chair Outdoor.
Hunt, who is based at TBWA\Hunt Lascaris in Johannesburg, was born in Zambia and educated in South Africa. He has been working in TBWA since 2003. Under his leadership, he has successfully reshaped the TBWA network and in the last few years, TBWA has been voted as Creative Network of the Year, both at Cannes and in numerous publications including Ad Age and Creativity. Most recently TBWA won 39 Lions at Cannes, and its Paris agency was Agency of the Year for a record fourth time.
Pandey is based at Ogilvy & Mather in Mumbai. Since 1994, under his leadership as a national creative director, Ogilvy & Mather has been named India's most creative agency ten times in the last eleven years. O&M India is now ranked amongst the most creative offices in the entire O&M worldwide network. And O&M India has also won a dozen Lions. In 2004, Piyush became the first Asian to be the president of Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival.
Linda Locke has been named amongst an elite global few, in Advertising Age International's feature story, ‘Women Breaking Barriers' and in October 2003, she was honoured with the prestigious Chairman's Award at the Singapore Creative Circle Awards. At the same award show in 2005, she was one of five individual recipients honoured with a Champion of the Creative Circle Award for her years of contribution to the industry. She was featured as one of the 16 most influential Creative Directors in Singapore. Linda is a highly awarded creative with over 300 awards to her name including a string of accolades from local, regional and international shows – she is a Gold Cannes Lion winner. This year Linda has been invited to be a part of the prestigious Cannes Lions judging panel.
The chairpersons and the jury will convene for a week next March at PEACH (Pattaya Exhibition and Convention Hall) Pattaya, Thailand, the hub of Thailand's East Coast. All the entries will be reviewed and results will be announced during AdFest on 14-17 March, 2007. The awards presentations will be held during the last two days.
According to Adfest's Jimmy Lam, the reason the festival is having different judging panels led by different Chairpersons, is for each judging panel, making up of creative leaders in the region, to focus on one award category: “We want the judges to have ample time, to crutinize each entry so as to identify and award the works that best represent the Asia Pacific region with great cultural differences and similarities. Judging creative works is a lot of hard work. We also want the judges to be able to enjoy the sun and fun of Pattaya, instead of getting stuck in a freezing room for five days to finish judging entries in all sort of different categories.”