YoungGuns International Award (also referenced as YoungGuns Award and YGAward) is an annual global award show for young and emerging creative talent in the advertising and communication industry. The award recognizes the best young commercial practitioners and students across the fields of advertising, communication design, digital creative, advertising media and public relations from around the world. Entrants into the award must be aged 30 or under. Entrants for the award compete for gold, silver and bronze awards across 8 divisions and 40 categories. Every year, two ultimate winners will be determined and named YoungGun of the Year and YoungGun Student of the Year. History Kristian Barnes, Jason Williams, and Michael Kean (CEO of market-leading global creative recruitment firm FBI Recruitment) founded the YoungGuns Award in 2001 from Sydney, Australia with the goal of recognizing and promoting upcoming talent rather than rewarding years of experience. They noted that the reason for starting the award was their frustration that major awards at the time were typically won by well established individuals within the industry. Innovation The YoungGuns Award show introduced a number of innovations in the award category. It was the first international award show focused solely on young and emerging talent, participants had to be under 30 to qualify for entry. It was first international award to produce an advertising campaign for its call of entries (see below). It was the first to offer prizes to the winners, for the YoungGun of the Year it was a cash prize as well as a place on the following years jury, and for the YoungGun Student of the Year it was a work placement with an international agency (Leo Burnett). It was the first to take the winners and finalists work on a travelling exhibition (including Australia, NZ, UK, US, HK, India Singapore, South Africa and Japan). It also introduced 20Guns - a peer voting system where the top voted work would be entered free of charge into the YoungGuns Award Call for entry YoungGuns was the first international award to produce an advertising campaign for its call of entries. The campaigns are renowned for being controversial. Most notable include "Peak Early" which focused on child prodigies; "Quit in Style" which allowed anyone to upload content such as videos and feedback to demonstrate how they would quit their jobs; 'Worth the Pain' which encouraged creatives to push through to greatness but told them