Hear the Young Lions roar!
It’s that time of year again, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where the great and the good of the marketing, advertising, PR, tech communities and many of the other multifaceted businesses that make up creative industries come together to celebrate the best and most effective creative work in the world.
This is my 5th year at Cannes (with 3 spent working as part of the Cannes Lions School faculty) and I’m super-excited to be working with the team at the Young Lions Competition to debrief the juries on every category from print to film to PR, to gain insights and understanding into what it takes to win a Lion. This is a rare and unusual opportunity for the competitors to actually ask direct questions of the jurors to assess why their entries won (or not). I love doing this because for me this is like reverse-mentoring – I get to learn from the Young Lions Competitors and the judges and expand my knowledge across disciplines. There are some fascinating themes emerging as this week’s juries share the work and their reasons for choosing it, which I’ll summarise once all the debriefs are over! It’s like creativity school for me and I find it so inspiring, firing me up for a whole year of creativity training following each Cannes.
So this is the first in a series of blogs in which I’ll share the briefs and the winning work for the Young Lions Competition in every category this year, here’s a little bit of information on how the competitions work if you don’t know. If you do you can skip onto the blogs about the briefs and the work!
Young Lions Competitions in summary:
To compete at the festival in June teams must first win their local Young Lions Competitions in their market.
Young Lions Competitors must be under 30.
Each competition has been allocated a not-for-profit brief for their discipline (shared on blogs follow to follow) which they have to work on during the week and submit their work to the jury.
The Competition Juries are made up of the shortlisting jury from the main Cannes Lions Festival category s and they judge the work to crown a Bronze, Silver and Gold winner in each category, with the Gold winners heading up on stage to collect their awards. Pictured above are Ketchum’s Head of Insight and Strategy, Ruth Yearly, Sarah Coghalan, Global Director at November and Adriana Valledares, President and CEO, Burson-Marsteller who judged the Marketers competition (sponsored by Ketchum).
The competition in numbers, to put the competitor’s hard work into context: 430 competitors in total across all the categories, broken down into the 7 categories as follows:
Print – 72
PR – 50
Media – 66
Marketers – 36
Digital – 90
Film – 82
Design – 40
So in the following blogs I’m going to post the brief for each competition, along with the winning work and insights from the jury. Bear with me, I’m in the middle of the process, with 5 debriefs to go over the next few days, but hope you find this as useful as I have!