Article
1 July 2022
Cannes Lions 2022: Palais Talk /
Notable quotes from a week spent speaking and listening to Cannes Lions jury presidents
The Contagious team dutifully attended press conferences and chased down interviews at Cannes to get the inside track on the big winners at the International Festival of Creativity. Here are some of the most noteworthy quotes, quips and aphorisms that we jotted down in a week spent speaking with jury presidents.
Agency side, if you want to win a gold Lion at Cannes, you’ve got to work on your ego. Very fast. What used to happen in the past were the rock star creative pair would be alone on the stage and receive all the limelight. Now what’s winning the golds is so much more complex and has many different dimensions – that to win you’ve got to collaborate with a lot of experts within their own craft expertise. If you kill your ego, that’s going to help you to be interested in someone who doesn't look like you or do what you do and then start to collaborate and add to the product. Then you'll be celebrated. It might not be one or two of you on stage. You'd be 10 or 15, but you’re still on stage and that feeling is going to bring you so much love.
On the client side, you’ve got to commit. To understand the difference between good and great, you’ve got to commit to your agency and your team. Stop jumping from one agency to another or putting five agencies into pitches for project based work – you're not going to win a Cannes Lion if you’re not building on your relationships, understanding each other or by progressing together.
– Fred Levron, Dentsu International (Direct jury president)
– Cleve Gibbon, Wunderman Thompson, Innovation jury president
Judy John, Edelman, PR jury president
Natalie Lam, Publicis Groupe, Print & Publishing jury president
Eugene Cheong, DDB Asia, Outdoor jury president
Hugo Veiga, AKQA, Mobile jury president
Fred Levron, Dentsu International, Direct jury president
I can remember coming here when the FAANG companies were the big disruptors. It was the frenemy of WPP […] Then the next wave was also the consulting firms coming into this space with Accenture's acquisitions and Deloitte Digital and even McKinsey and Bain, and it was like, “Oh, my goodness, what's going to happen? Are these consulting firms taking share?”
What I see now is this is absolutely not a zero-sum game. The pie and the space is getting bigger. It's never been a more incredible time to think about creative transformation and the role that all of us play together collectively, to solve for what we've always wanted to do in marketing – business problems, world problems.
Beth Ann Kaminkow, VMLY&R Commerce, Creative Commerce jury president
Yasuharu Sasaki, Dentsu, Brand Experience & Activation jury president
Nils Leonard, Uncommon, Industry Craft Lions jury president
Cannes Deconstructed /
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