Amy Weston’s Cannes Diary #3: “Don’t ask creatives to count”
Amy Weston, Executive Creative Director, Clemenger BBDO, is representing Australia on the Cannes Brand Experience & Activation Lions jury. As judging continues in Cannes, Weston shares her learnings from day three inside the jury room, exclusive to CB.
Learnings from Day 3.
1. Don’t ask creatives to count.
After three days of judging, we had the small task of reducing a stupid amount of work down to a list that could fit on a single sheet of A4 paper.
The tides of the conversation shifted quickly. Work was ruled out. Work was saved. And more than once we thought we’d nailed the final list, only to discover we’d got the numbers wrong and had to go back in again.
2. Music matters.
Any case film with a great track, or even better a jingle, had a habit of tunnelling its way into our brains. With our phones locked away most of the day, and no opportunity to rot our brains in downtime, we found ourselves subconsciously singing about the work. Excellent strategy.
3. The gut gets the final vote.
Yes, results matter. Yes, the category criteria are scrutinised. But the whole point of putting 10 wildly different people in a room together is the human bit. The intangible stuff that can’t be measured on a spreadsheet (which is fortunate given our struggles with counting). For a group of people supposedly making rational decisions, there was an awful lot of laughing, cheering and the occasional watery eye, that ultimately decided the outcome.
Every piece of work that made it to the Palais stage is there because it was brave, it demanded interaction, it spoke to something happening in the world right now, and because it pushed the ambition of the category forward. It’s a list the jury is proud of, and the winners should be even prouder.
Our Jury President Rafael Pitanguy is annoyingly good at distilling three days of debate into a single sentence.
“This is not work about what people felt, but how they reacted to what they felt.”
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