INTERVIEW

 

So what originally brought you to Cannes? Are you from London?

 

I am from London, the office is based in London. I’m not from an advertising background. Prior to being at Cannes Lion, I ran something called “The Edinburgh Television Festival,” which is TV. Before that I ran an architecture festival, and I also created and ran a festival called “The Media Festival,” which was all about multiplatform creative and commercial models and also “The Media Festival Arts” that was all about arts organization in digital technology to better distribute and reach audiences. So my background is in festivals and large events in the creative industry as opposed to actually being from the industry.

 

You’ve touched all these different festivals and industries, what do you feel like are some common threads? What are some things you had to learn going into an advertising festival?

 

It was funny, prior to running festivals, I come from an office management background, in TV, and that was very working with creatives. I was working in TV, but also with writers creating scripts and creating longform comedy content and I absolutely love television and I really enjoyed working in the television industry. It made me think of creativity inside of a very specific box. It changes slightly with Netflix, but the whole of TV that we know, almost every piece of television content is through the same lens, you know? It’s design for a commercial half hour or a commercial hour. It’s really specific for the medium. In some ways they were so innovative in terms of the stories they told, but the means with which they could tell the story were quite limited because TV is defined media. You can argue that’s changing, but broadly speaking for the last sixty years, there have been various different lenses which have been accepted as the lenses you can create within. Then coming to Cannes, it sort of turned on its head. In a sense I felt that creatives, in some ways, were more constrained in terms of the stories that they were being asked to tell, because they were working for clients. I’m using the word constrained to make a point, obviously they had options, but they’re very much designing for clients as opposed to coming up with ideas off the top of their heads. However, the means with which they have to tell the story, or to build the message, are infinite. So it was really, really interesting, and I love working with creative people with both of those constraints.

What I love about Cannes Lion, and it’s been running for what, 66 years? Is that it’s constantly able to evolve and constantly able to add new strings to its bow because the means with which we communicate are always being added to. And the combination of ways that people can tell stories and the means are so complex now, that we started with film advertising, and now we’re adding new methods of communication all the time. This year at the festival, we launched the new Creative ECommerce Lion, for example, and we’ll be launching the Creative Strategy Lion, the Sport Lion. Brands and creatives who are working in and around brands have just such an incredible panoply of worlds to communicate in, ways with which to communicate. And not just communicate. Today’s marketer has so many different types of--communication is in a way a limiting word-- so many different requirements in order to express yourself fully. So for that reason, having worked for the TV festival, I absolutely loved that, it’s been such a refreshing thing to come to somewhere which is always useful. Because in our job, as festival organizers, we serve the industry. So it’s really within the context of the industry. It’s our job to make sure we’re always useful, we’re always adding in and redefining and changing the elements of the festival.

Increasingly, at Cannes Lion, because it was originally a festival about creatives and agencies, and it wasn’t until fifteen years ago that brand marketers started to come. Now there are audiences diversifying more than ever before, meeting people on a shared endeavor and breaking bread with them. That’s what events like Cannes Lion are so good at doing, because your there for a common reason, which is to learn from and be inspired by the creativity. And there are so many different types of diverse voices there now, and incredibly different skill sets and experience. It’s a complete refuelling for people to come along and absorb not just the things they see or the things they hear, but the energy from the other people with whom they come into contact with.  

 

I know you mentioned a few of those new categories, what was the thought behind those? What are the goals Cannes is trying to achieve with those new categories?

 

We try not to just add, add, add. We want to, it’s essential for the awards to be relevant, because it’s the creative benchmarking tool for the industry used all over the world. And the reason that’s important is because when you set the benchmark, then people strive to achieve it and it raises the bar across the industry. And we want to constantly be reflecting the whole range of tools that are available to marketers. If nothing else, to help make sense of all the options they have. I am not a marketer, but it must be baffling the range of options you have available to you in order to get your message across. So we want to try to reflect all elements of the branded communication ecosystem. And the industry is moving so quickly now, that we need to make sure there aren’t gaps in our overall portfolio.

 

I’ve talked to all these creatives that come from different global ad markets, and no matter where they started, one consistent thing I notice is that the Cannes is held up as the creative benchmark to aspire to. I’m always so impressed by the way the Cannes Lion transcends across different ad markets globally. How do you achieve and reinforce that?

 

That’s a really good question. It’s interesting because I was brought into the business when we launched the Healthcare Lions which were a new set of awards for a new part of the industry, with healthcare and communications agencies. So I witnessed a new section of the industry coming into Cannes, who knew about Cannes Lion, but hadn’t had the opportunity to participate. And the legacy of the brand, what it speak of and what it means to people in the industry is passed on from generation to generation as I’m sure you know, it’s our jury that selects the ideas every year. And they come in and they are relentless about only awarding the very best, I would say it’s as much about having relentlessly only awarding the very best combined with being assiduous about ensuring the judging is fair and it’s only done by absolute experts at the top of the game in their field, done in a robust, audited way so there’s no chance of corruption. They are audited by an external consultancy, because Cannes is a big business, it moves share prices and it changes people’s lives and all the rest of it. The combination of our really, really strong rules around who is allowed to be a judge, how the judging takes place (all onsite, nothing done offsite) and the auditing and all the technologies we use to ensure there’s no corruption, combined with people know this is the very, very best award in the world to win in advertising. Creatives are proud people and don’t want to put their name into something the world looks at and goes, it wasn’t that good. I saw this for a time when the Lions health jury came together for the first time. Having never judged in Cannes before, they were absolutely connected to always asking themselves if it was Cannes worthy. I think that’s something we have to constantly monitor it, but it’s something that is to a degree perpetuated by the industry. We just have to make sure, as long as we know it’s relevant and the right people are doing the judging, I think that’s probably the way the bar is made to be set so high. It’s really, really difficult and we could lose our nerve because it’s expensive to enter and a tiny portion of people win, so you could sort of say, well the business model would be better if we allowed people to win. That would be a short term gain, because then you get the hook in more people’s mouth more easily, but we’ve been really scrupulous about that. I saw we, but I mean the people who have been running the business for how long? It is the heart of our business and it’s been the number one benchmark and we take that very seriously. At risk of people entering and then thinking, I wasted my money and I’m never going to win, at risk of losing that customer, we are really ruthless about only letting the very best be awarded.

The perpetuation of the industry by the standards you set—that’s really interesting.

 

And I remember when I joined, our chairman now, who joined before I joined, I remember him saying (and you’ll see this through how people in media are so opinionated about the Cannes Lion), when you run a festival like this, the industry is so invested that they feel like they own it. They’re almost surprised to learn there’s a whole business behind the running of it because it’s so much about the industry. Honestly, it feels as if it’s as owned by the industry as us. It’s a sign of how deeply it's embedded.

 

How do you define innovation yourself? How has that perspective changed from being at Cannes?

 

 

That’s such a difficult question. Funnily enough, I was just having lunch with someone and talking about innovation and what it means. It’s a word that has been used to define a whole load of different things, which isn’t necessarily the best thing. Innovation is about doing things and using different tools in different ways. At our festival, it was used when we launched Lions Innovation, the initial was data x tech x ideas. People innovate all the time, when a child takes a Lego and starts putting it in a different configuration to how it’s supposed to be, there’s an innovation to that. It’s an act. I don’t think it’s something which some people do and some people don’t. In terms of our Innovation, it was really designed to reflect the explosion of software and hardware opportunities for the marketers and how they could make sense of what their vast amounts of data, which some of them have access to, and try to understand, and the seemingly endless types of software and hardware and technology that were allowing content and media and messages to be flowing to and from people in loads of different ways. It felt like there was this big flurry of new tools that we wanted to lift up and scrutinize and discuss in terms of how they could be used creatively for brand marketers. I’m struggling with that a little bit. It could mean different things for different people. It’s about making something new, isn’t it? Innovating.

 

What are your thoughts on the difference between innovation and disruption?

 

Innovation is the act of creating something new, whereas disruption is the way in which that act or new thing upsets the status quo or the environment that it operates in. I think neither of them have any value in of themselves, no that’s not fair to say, I mean, there’s no intrinsic point to doing any of those things unless you have an end goal in mind. I get tired of both of those words as well. Why disrupt something? That’s not enough of an end in itself. Disruption can have good and bad effects, but I think that’s what I would say. Innovation is the act of making something, disruption is the act of breaking something along the way. Potentially through innovation or something else. I use both of those words sparingly, but it’s difficult not to. I definitely feel that a reason the Cannes Lion is important is because the industry is still trying to put a language and commonality among these things that are happening. Without the language and without our attempts to find out what things are, giving things names, we’ll be struggling even more.