Toronto-based Dashboard’s creation of the now-famous MINDI desktop avatar for Unilever’s Axe brand won the Yahoo Cream of Venice award at last week’s inaugural Venice Festival of Media – quite an achievement considering that 34 finalists from 19 countries were judged.

‘We’re absolutely elated,’ Dashboard strategic director Barry Hillier tells MiC. ‘But what’s really interesting is that there’s now an international opportunity to showcase something like MINDI. We wanted to submit it to a few other shows, but they didn’t even have appropriate categories.

‘I think one of the reasons our application (appealed to) the jury is that it represents all the things that everybody’s talking about – two-way communication, Web 2.0,’ adds Hillier. ‘It’s a really good embodiment of new media thinking, new marketing thinking, new consumer thinking.’