Congratulations! Busuu.com Wins the Silver Lion Prize at the Cannes Festival, the Most Presitious Prize in Advertising

Silbo Gomero Campaign Wins at Cannes

This just in from our friends at Busuu.com:

busuu.com wins a Silver Lion in the International Advertising Festival in Cannes for our Silbo Gomero campaign.

In October 2008 we contracted the Madrid agency La Despensa in order to launch a campaign to improve the awareness of our website.

The outcome was the amazing campaign to “Rescue the Silbo Gomero” for which we won now the most important price in the advertising industry.

We loved the idea from the beginning: If you can learn languages on busuu.com - why not also learn a nearly extinct whistled language from the Canary Islands - el Silbo Gomero? It´s not only an entertaining campaign but it draws the attention to an important cause which we from busuu.com fully support: to prevent smaller languages from their extinction! So we decided to create a fascinating video explaining the history of this amazing language and launched a special section within our website where you can find lessons of “el Silbo” (if you log in, you can see the full content and start practicing).

The outcome was impressive - we received huge media coverage in Spain (contacting all important media by sending them a bird cage with a plastic singing bird inside… they loved it! ;-) and “el Silbo Gomero” was in the news again. The media even supported the application of this charming language to be recognized as UNESCO world heritage.

http://blog.busuu.com/busuu_com_wins_a_silver_lion_in_cannes

Props!

Congratulations, guys, this is excellent stuff. We here at Free Language appreciate your bringing attention to an unusual, endangered minority language, and taking the time, effort and care to integrate it into your system so that people around the world can learn about it, and learn it... for free!

Click here to view our original post on this cool feature - and to watch the prize-winning video!

Visit Busuu to learn English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Polish and Silbo Gomero for free!