On Tuesday, Media Experts’ Jessica Stein, search marketing analyst and Carla Museitef, buyer digital solutions, were named the Gold winners in this year’s Young Lions Media category, being chosen as the top team of the 89 pairs who entered to represent the country at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this June.

The winning entry, which was created for the David Suzuki Foundation, saw the pair create a campaign in 24 hours around the 30X30 challenge of getting people outdoors for 30 minutes a day, each day, for 30 days.

The entry almost didn’t happen, according to Stein and Museitef. The pair, who have entered the Canadian leg of the competition twice before, weren’t going to enter this year but say they were convinced to do so by Media Experts VP of communications Ian Maclean.

Aside from the time-management challenges around creating an entire media plan for the competition in 24 hours, Stein and Museitef say the other big surprise for them was how much their strategy around the project changed once they took part in the event.

“We took a different approach than what we were hoping to go for before we got into the room,” Museitef says. “At first we were talking about doing an entirely digital plan but when we saw the brief we decided to deviate away from digital because the point of the campaign was to get people to go outside, so we didn’t want to reach people through their devices and computers.

The winning campaign targeted Canadian professionals in the city who spend the majority of their time indoors, in cars and with their electronic devices. The key insight of the campaign was that people often forget the value of spending time outdoors, and increased reliance on technology has furthered this disconnect with nature. Stein and Museitef’s campaign aimed to educate large companies and inspire them to build green spaces by communicating the costs benefits associated with encouraging their employees to be outdoors more often. That education would be coupled with a media plan that brings nature to the forefront with the tagline “Missed me? #bring nature back” and elements like greenery on the top of streetcars where the OOH ads appeared.

In addition the campaign was supported by a branded content program on HGTV that incorporated 10 of the corporate teams who had built an environmentally friendly space at work and used it for 30 minutes a day for a  month. The green work spaces in the campaign were also encouraged to be used for developing outdoor meetings, exercise classes and events during the work day.

“The main challenge of doing the project was trying to contain ourselves and keep focused,” she adds. “We had a lot of ideas but needed to focus on the main one and keep the plan contained.”

Stein joined Media Experts in 2011 after going to school at McGill University and earning a Bachelor of Commerce. Museitef came to Media Experts in 2010 after graduating from Concordia University.

The team, who both started their media careers at Media Experts, say they are now focused on “going to Cannes and winning.”

Stay with MiC and strategy for a full week of coverage live from Cannes starting on Sunday June 15.