Louise McQuat’s LIA Diary #1: The healthy jealousy of judging great work

Louise McQuat, Global ECD, Akcelo, is representing Australia on the Digital and Creators & Social Platforms jury at LIA in Vegas. Here, McQuat, along with most of the other Australian and New Zealand jurors, reports exclusively for CB.

I’m 24 hours in, and I haven’t been outside. As far as I can tell, I’ve boarded the world’s biggest cruise ship, and we’re not going anywhere.

I’m here judging Social, Creator and Digital at the London International Awards. Day one involved sitting in front of a computer watching hundreds of case studies. The arguments start tomorrow.

But there’s something quite useful about being made to sit still and look at what the rest of the world has been doing.

Working in Australia, you can feel reasonably across the good work. You’ve seen the things everyone’s sharing. You know the campaigns everyone’s talking about. Then you spend a day judging and realise “everyone” is quite a small group of people with suspiciously similar feeds.

So much of what I watched today had never reached me. Some of it probably wouldn’t have reached me even if it had run in my own market. It belongs to corners of the internet I don’t inhabit.

There’s a funny arrogance in working in social and forgetting that your own feed isn’t a representative sample of humanity. Mine has clearly been withholding things.

The best discovery was a handful of ideas that made me properly, angrily jealous.

I consider this a very healthy response to creativity. You admire the work, immediately resent whoever made it, then spend a few seconds mentally checking whether you could plausibly have thought of it first.

A recognisable human behaviour, given an original spin. Something so obvious once you’ve seen it that you can’t believe it wasn’t already out in the world.

Those are the ones that make you want to get back to your own team and challenge what you’re making every day. Once you’ve finished being annoyed.

The jury brings together people from around the world with intimidatingly interesting backgrounds and experiences. Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to finding out what they saw that I missed.

Tonight, I might attempt to find the exit.

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