The UN Department of Public Information (UNDPI) Gold Award, presented today in New York, has been given to Lowe Brindfors advertising agency of Stockholm for its “Lottery of Life” campaign for Save the Children Sweden.

The campaign has been so successful in Sweden, generating more than 250,000 hits on its website and extensive discussion in the media, that it is being expanded to other countries and languages.

A team of Lowe Brindfors staff created an integrated campaign, including a website featuring a lottery wheel where Swedes – who represent less than 1 per cent of the world’s population – could take a virtual spin and learn what their life would be like and what problems they would face if they had been born in another country.

Stefan Pagréus, a copywriter at Lowe Brindfors, told the UN News Centre today that he and his colleagues wanted to create a different kind of campaign to those traditionally associated with aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“Many of the campaigns are quite the same: it’s all horrible pictures of starvation and death,” he said. “We thought that this way we are making people care about this issue in a very different way.”

Save The Children Sweden, a regular client of Lowe Brindfors, wanted a fresh campaign that could attract a younger target group than usual.

“When we discussed the basic idea it felt strong since we immediately realized that the thought of ‘who would I be if I was somebody else’ is a universal thought,” said Pelle Lundquist, an art director at the advertising agency.

“When we continued to work on it we felt that there’s a good dynamic between the abstract thought and the hard statistics of where you actually would be born, if born again today.

“Being born in Sweden, a rich country, is a privilege to only 0.08 per cent, a striking figure since being born to a life in poverty, wars etc. is somewhere over 70 per cent.”

The UNDPI Silver Award went to DDB Budapest of Hungary for a digital and interactive campaign for Amnesty International Magyarorszag that called for continued pressure on world leaders to deliver on the anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Bronze Award was given to DDB Shanghai of China for an outdoor campaign for that country’s environmental protection foundation to promote a reduction in vehicular traffic.

Seven other finalists received also honourable mentions for their work. The awards, handed out as part of the New York Festivals 2011 International Advertising Awards, were first established in 1990.