Alison Tilling’s Cannes Diary #1: Inside the jury room of the Creative Strategy Lions

Alison Tilling, Chief Strategy Officer at VML AUNZ, represented Australia on this year’s Creative Strategy Lions jury in Cannes. Here, she gives us a glimpse inside the jury room – sharing what set the best work apart, the joy of discovering diverse ideas from around the world, and why judging this category is hard – but exhilarating.

Judging the Creative Strategy Lion

At 10.30pm on night one we finally locked in a shortlist, down from a long list 150 entries out of nearly 1,000 entries all up. That’s a lot of strategy. Obviously, I like a lot of strategy, which was a good job because day one was 13 hours of intense discussion and debate.

It’s been said before but bloody hell it.is.so.difficult to get on a shortlist let alone win metal of any hue. It is also bloody hard – but strangely exhilarating – to decide what makes the cut and what doesn’t.

We set some criteria for our creative strategy winners:
– Strategy that could be summed up in one clear sentence
– Strategy at the very heart of the work
– A spark of brilliance – whether through insight or a new take on strategy or comms – something we were jealous of
– Real world impact and proper commercial success

With those in mind, and we kept coming back to them, we got to our shortlist. Bronzes and Silvers were very tough, but by the time we got to our Grand Prix things were a bit more clear-cut. Long Term Platform was a new sub-category this year and it was pretty much impossible to walk past Dove Real Beauty, which has been writing the playbook on brand strategy for about twenty years now.

A highlight for me was the sheer variety of work – countries, types of work, different flavours of strategy – and meeting a fantastic group of fellow jurors.