Roxie Rules at Griffin Farley Beautiful Minds

7/26/2019 Unknown 0 Comments


This year, BICsters Roxie Xie '20 and Melissa Julien '18 not only scored coveted slots in the highly competitive Griffin Farley Beautiful Minds Program, but Roxie's team won the pitch.

Created by BBH to honor Strategic Planner Griffin Farley, The Beautiful Minds program (GFBM) is a hybrid planning bootcamp and networking event. Participants in this highly selective program get a free crash course in planning from some of the top planners in the industry. Thirteen teams were selected to participate in this year to crack the brief over the weekend. Participants were tasked with a brief to raise awareness of breast self-examination for early breast cancer diagnosis and to reach 500k downloads of a breast self-examination tool app, "The Daisy Wheel." Only four teams made the finals for the 48-hour Bootcamp and then got to pitch their strategy to the client, the founder of The Get In Touch Foundation who made The Daisy Wheel app. The pitch took place at Facebook here In New York on Tuesday night, July 23rd.

The idea behind Roxie's winning team was #PutHerFirst which aims to get tech-savvy millennial kids to rally their moms to put their breast health first by downloading the Daisy Wheel app. According to Roxie, "This strategy will break the barrier of the awkward breast health conversation to bring kids regardless of gender into the conversation to help the ones who're truly on high-risk--women over the age of 45, to take care of their breast health." Her team consisted of an account planner from BBH, an account intern from BBH, an account planner from Anomaly, a media planner from Horizon Media and Roxie. In addition to winning the GFBM pitch, her team also won the Facebook Impact Award.

At the end of the pitch, mentees were then "auctioned off" at a celebration at Facebook where Roxie was selected by a senior strategist mentor from mcgarrybowen. According to Roxie: "It's been one of a kind experience. BBH was amazing, and the mentor they paired us with was amazing, the mentor action in the mentor thing was amazing too!"

You can see the showcase night here where it was Livestreamed on Facebook.

Roxie and Melissa follow a tradition of BICsters who participate every summer in this competitive program. The first year, Maxime Menant won for Most Culturally Relevant Strategy in 2014.