The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is the premier conference and awards ceremony for people working in creative communications. It is an annual event, now in its 61st year. Over 11,000 delegates from around the world attend to view shortlisted work, network and attend seminars, workshops and master classes.
A key part of the festival is the Young Lions Competition, which aims to encourage young and emerging talent in the industry. Teams are made up of two people working as a team who are both under 28. The categories include marketing, design, print, film and media buying.
Cannes Image 22014 was the inaugural year of the Young PR Lions Competition. My colleague Martyn Rosney and I, both Account Managers at Ireland’s leading PR agency Wilson Hartnell, were lucky enough to be selected to be the first team to represent Ireland at the Cannes Young Lions PR competition. As there was no Cannes Lions representatives for Ireland in 2014 Martyn had to persuade the international selectors to allow a team from Ireland enter. Across all the disciplines we were the only Irish Young Lions team at Cannes 2014
Prior to the competition, we were told that the client would be a charity or non-profit organisation and the details would only be made available when we arrived in Cannes. To ensure a level playing field we were limited to using the PC provided by the competition organisers in a room shared with the other competitors. The aim was to create a PR campaign which would:
• Connect with the charity’s brand value and have an impact (i.e increase in donations or other applicable parameters)
• Increase awareness/create engagement with the public
• Identify and build relations with relevant stakeholders (journalists, interest groups, opinion leaders, industry representatives, internal audiences etc.)
• Create PR supporting material applicable in relevant media channels (i.e. press releases, infographics, statistics, online content, etc.)
We arrived in Cannes on Saturday morning to receive the brief. The chosen NGO was the United Nations Blue Heart Campaign which raises awareness of the problem of human trafficking and inspires those with decision-making power to effect change.
We also had a chance to meet our fellow competitors who had travelled from all over the world to compete.
We spent the rest of Saturday researching the human trafficking and putting together our initial idea for our campaign. From when the doors of the Palais des Festivals opened at 8.30am on Sunday morning, we had eleven hours to put together a ten slide PowerPoint deck and a three hundred word summary of our campaign. Writing that now it seems like a lot of time, but under pressure to compile a whole campaign (in pretty cramped conditions and in a windowless room!) the time flew by. We finished just in time and spent the rest of night putting together a script and rehearsing our presentation which we were making in front of the judges at 9.30 the following morning.
The presentation went well and though the judges asked some tough questions but overall had a very positive response to our campaign. Being one of the first teams to present, we then had the arduous wait for the winners to be announced.
At lunch time, all the teams assembled again to hear the results. It had been a very intense three days and being the first year of the competition it was difficult to gauge what exactly the judges would be looking for.
The winning team were Yuichiro Okada, Account Executive, and Tetsuya Umeda, Interactive Planner from ASATSU-DK Japan who developed a great campaign based on the relationship between babies and new parents to highlight the cruelty of human trafficking and illustrate how precious every human life is.
Beyond the competition
After the competition ended, I was lucky enough to spend two more days attending the festival and was blown away by the quality of the speakers, workshops and displays of award winning work. Highlights included listening to Sarah Jessica Parker talk about how she manages social media, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian talk about phone hacking and Kanye West preaching about innovation in technology and music.
It was also a great opportunity to talk to peers and senior industry leaders about working in different markets and the challenges and opportunities that working in PR affords us.
Summing up
To compete as a Young Lion in the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was a wonderful experience and I am very thankful to the organisers and my company Wilson Hartnell for their fantastic support.
As one seasoned veteran of festival remarked to me “Cannes is to normal, everyday work what Paris Fashion Week is to normal, everyday clothes.” Cannes inspired me in many different ways and gave me a new perspective and a unique sense of the industry as a whole. I am definitely a better PR practitioner having competed and attended!
Niamh O’Keeffe @niamh_okeeffe ia an Account Manager at Wilson Hartnell, Ireland’s leading PR agency and Ogilvy PR’s Irish office. She represented Ireland at the inaugural Young PR Lions competition at the 2014 Cannes International Festival of Creativity.
