Verified facts & recycled fashion win Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) honours at MIPTV
The 3rd edition of the MIPTV SDG Award was presented to the Association of Commercial Television and VOD Services in Europe (ACT) at a ceremony held in the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France on April 5, 2022.
This year, an inaugural SDG Innovation Award was also accepted by Junk Kouture, a company that encourages young people to create high-fashion clothing from recycled objects and materials.
These awards are the fruit of ongoing collaboration between the organizers of MIPTV, RX France (formerly Reed MIDEM), in the context of its membership in the SDG Media Compact, and the United Nations. Established in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the awards recognize media companies for their action and contribution to delivering against the 17 global goals internationally. Previous recipients have included Sky and A+E Networks.
Founded in 2018, the SDG Media Compact brings together media and entertainment companies. It now numbers over 250 members committed to leveraging their resources and talent to amplify and accelerate progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Speaking via a digital link, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, said:
“I congratulate ACT for their leadership role in galvanizing European media to develop a common stance on tackling disinformation. Misinformation puts lives at risk, divides society and pollutes the media landscape. It is also running rampant around the war in Ukraine. The need for trusted, accurate sources of information has never been more critical and media plays a central role. It also gives me great pleasure to recognize Junk Kouture for having found fresh ways to engage young people as change makers on the topic of sustainability.”
In Cannes to receive the SDG Award was ACT Director General Grégoire Polad, who said the organisation’s members invest a lot of time and effort in making sure their audiences have a trusted, fact-checked source of news and information. ACT, whose 28 members represent Europe’s leading commercial broadcasters and VoD providers, received the MIPTV SDG Award in honour of their leadership on the issue of online disinformation. ACT’s ongoing campaign has both promoted the value of trusted news sources to societies, whilst bringing together private and public service broadcasters, academics and NGOs to develop and provide potential regulatory solutions to the spread of disinformation. “This award is very timely, given what we are seeing in the world today. I’d like to dedicate the award to the Ukrainian broadcasters that are working so hard to ensure we have accurate news about that conflict.”
Speaking via a link, ACT president Guillaume de Posch commented: “We are grateful and humbled to receive this prestigious award. This reflects the work of the ACT and all the work done by its members to promote the SDGs, and particularly quality news and fact checked information sources as relates to them. In these times of uncertainty, from Covid to the current crisis in Ukraine, commercial television continues to play an essential role in bringing society together as a trusted and responsible media.”
Junk Kouture’s special Innovation Award was awarded to them for the impact of their creative integrated programme engaging the world’s youth across several SDGs.
This first award was collected by the organisation’s founder, Troy Armour, who said he wants to build the organisation into “a kind of Olympics for creative kids”. “When you’re a teenager at school there’s a lot of social capital attached to being good at sport. But if you’re creative and not good at sports then you tend to end up stuck in the corner. Junk Kouture is all about unlocking that creativity — giving kids resilience and transforming them into changemakers”. At the same time, it is changing the way the youth of today view waste materials, focusing attention on the way we are consuming and the impact of our daily choices on the world we live in.
The next edition of the annual MIPTV SDG Awards will take place in Cannes in April 2023 and will recognize progress made by the television industry as a whole and some of its members towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
MIPTV SDG Awards (PDF)
