Day 2: See It Be It 2022

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Day 02.

Finding positives: I don’t always get to start the day at 6am.

Today, my mind woke up minutes before my alarm, so that when it rang, I was raring to go. I tried to get ready, but couldn’t really settle myself down enough to focus. I paced back and forth to the bathroom a few times, forgetting what I needed to do.

Sometimes when you have too much you want to do, it helps to stop everything and start from the beginning. I picked a quick 10-minute mindfulness meditation on Spotify, calmed my breathing, took in the morning, and started fresh. It made such a huge difference that I resolved to do this every day in Cannes.

We walked down to the Palais to join Katherine O'Brien , our guide, SIBI class of 2016, and a creative legend in her own right. She felt like a big sister, tacking on fierce insights to every talk, lamenting with us, answering questions, brainstorming with us, and inspiring us at every turn. Kat gave us a lot of room to enjoy the program in our own way, and so although the schedule was jam-packed, we felt like there was time to do everything we wanted. We were half an hour earlier than the Palais opens, so we went in through the Cannes offices (glamour, glamour).

Our very first session was with Makenzie Chilton ?? Career Coach , founder of Love Your Mondays. I could tell you all about how this breezy badass has coached some of the most incredible minds in advertising, how she helps brilliant people advocate for themselves, but instead I’ll tell you: we walked in with simple questions, and walked out with the roadmap for finding really big answers.

She helped us to define our values: those non-negotiable but totally individual things we should be looking for in a job that actually makes us happy and fulfilled. Not just the baseline (respect / work life balance / honesty), but the traits that truly gave us energy as individuals.

Under her guidance, everyone came up with something different. Here’s mine:

Self-Expression: I want to be able to tell my own stories. I want to capture characters and their unique passions. I want to approach briefs for specific people, not just the average target audience.

Love: I want a community that has room for forgiveness and individuality, where people are free to be their weird selves. I want kindness in all my interactions. I want to get to know people on a deeper level, and feel comfortable being vulnerable.

Ultimate Minigolf: I want the chance to play, experiment, and fail. I want to invent my own way of doing things, and have the room to change that every day.

I’ve also heard food, fleeting, blue, ocean, pet, shrimp risotto, freedom. Everyone had their own answers, and their own way to define them. But we all walked away feeling that we knew what we wanted out of our professional lives (and to an extent, our personal ones).

Next up: A visit to see a real, Cannes Lions jury in action.

It was really early in the day, and even earlier in their judging process (I think they were one coffee past “hello”). We weren’t prepared with questions, and kind of cast around for a minute. Karo Gomez (an unstoppable force if I’ve ever met one, what I would do for an ounce of her bravery) dove in with the first. She said that she’d love to serve on a Cannes jury one day, and asked what advice they would have when it’s her turn (hopefully, next year).

One of the members actually laughed a little, and said “It won’t be next year”. He said you would need a Lion to serve on the Cannes jury. And then he talked about how prestigious and impossible a goal like that was, the achievement of a lifetime, and repeated at the end that there was no way Karo could expect to be on a Cannes jury any time soon.

I wanted to include this story because it made me realise that a lot of people don’t actually know what See It Be It is. We weren’t a lot of students asking for a tour around the festival, but a chosen group of rising creative leaders noted for exceptional thinking. Not only had half of us won Lions before, but a few of us won during this year’s festival. It was no small deal that we were given this opportunity, and we all felt it was audacious for him to assume none of us had won before, that hoping to serve on the jury was a far-flung goal. We had been selected out of hundreds, all over the world, to be here.?

I think it put a little fire in our steps.?

The next time someone asked us what See It Be It was, we made sure to tell them.

Our next session was with Maddy Kramer , a tornado of creativity, initiative, and invention. She was part of See It Be It 2015, and taught us ‘The Art of the Side Hustle’. Although, I liked her paraphrasing more: ‘Maddy does ideas’.

Essentially, she talked about trusting your intuition and fearlessly being the creative you are. So often we’re asked to define our creativity and put a box around it. But we’re not ‘digital creatives’, ‘all about craft’, ‘storytellers’. We’re creatives. Maddy does ideas. When you step out of your box and just make the ideas you love, I think there’s a lot more potential to start making amazing work.

“Done is better than perfect”.?

She also said that if you wait for something to be perfect it will never get made. But if you make it, you’ll get better every time you fail. In fact, Maddy started her presentation with her failures. And for each one she was able to sharpen her intuition, and it allowed her to give herself the space to take risks and try something new again in the future. Creatives have to be able to be risk-takers, and that means we have to be able to fail.

Her talk was absolutely a highlight for us all, and we all walked away with renewed purpose as creatives. Personally, I have notebooks on notebooks full of ideas that I put away because there was no brand to attach to them, no brief asking for those ideas. Maddy reminded me that I’m here on this Earth to create. And if there’s no client, I can still make ideas for myself. It’s through those experiments and failures, and really just the personal projects, that I’ll sharpen my pencil and gain that experience which will help me grow into an outstanding creative.

We talked to Maddy a little too long (an inspired audience is always brimming with questions). So afterward we ended up running around, trying to catch a 15-minute lunch. Some of the girls discovered that our passes got us into the VIP lounges – solid gold. We ate, collaborated on personal projects (couldn’t help ourselves after hearing Maddy), and stuffed our pockets with bread rolls for the next session.

Next up was Chief Creatives on the Terrace with Bas Korsten, Nadia Lossgott, Lucy Aitken, and our own Swati Bhattacharya.

Afterward (and after a little getting lost, a little running around) we headed to The Hub to listen to Tea Uglow ????? (‘Gender Cribbing for Marketers’).

I’m having a lot of trouble keeping this at any kind of word limit, because Tea is someone I could listen to for literally days on end. She has an endless fascination with words, and the etymology of ideas; and an unselfconscious way of speaking and speaking about those ideas without feeling like there’s one end-all answer for anything.?

She talked about ‘literally’, and how the dictionary definition has actually been updated to where ‘literally’ literally means ‘figuratively’. And how gendered terms like she/him are inherently biased, whereas terms like they/them inspire fairness. When you say “he does the cleaning”, does it spark anything different from when you say “she does the cleaning”? She imagines it does.

She talked about ‘normal’, and how it only really means anything in math. And how there’s not really such a thing as ‘fair’; only ‘unfair’ – and how while any child can define what is unfair, we all have trouble agreeing on what is fair. So maybe the definition is really just ‘that which is not unfair’?

I think the fascinating thing about listening to Tea is not that she has all of the answers, but that she asks a lot of fantastic questions. And while a little bit of this talk, yes, was about gender – most of it was about how we think, and how we form boxes around those thoughts (literally/she/him/normal/fair) as if it gives them definition, when it really doesn’t. And maybe by keeping our minds open to the fact that nothing is well-defined, nothing is set in stone, we will be better able to empathise with and absorb new ideas.

Next, we met the Glass Jury. They were wonderful, they were inspiring, generous with their insights and passion. I think it was a joy for us to meet them and see how the future of advertising is being debated and defined.

Afterward, we had a private session with Karabo Poppy and Nkanyezi Masango, to talk about Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation. Karabo is a brilliant South African illustrator, and Nkanyezi is the Group ECD at King James.

They talked about equity, and ensuring that brands reference cultures in an ethical way. When you reference (read: take from) a culture, how are you then giving back to that culture?

One key suggestion they had was collaboration, working with artists from that culture to ensure 1) it’s appropriately referenced, 2) you are giving back to the artists of that culture, and 3) proper credit is given to the culture.

Some other things they shared were to

• Challenge brands to give back better
• Pay up-and-coming artists market rate
• Don’t just take the aesthetic, actually get involved and give back
• Demand accountability

Like a lot of cultural equity discussions, our Q&A dissolved into an “is it ok when I do this” “how about if I do that”. I think that it’s extremely helpful to have a proper forum where people can ask these questions, but a point came up in our discussion that a few of us had to side-bar after the talk.?

Someone asked about a specific situation in Asia, where her client couldn’t afford a Korean talent, and so they cast a Thai talent instead, and it blew up in their faces when Korean audiences called out that the actress wasn’t able to speak Korean.

This wasn’t a shock to those of us coming from Asia, where racial casting horror stories like this are a dime a dozen, but it was a shock to everyone else. We found ourselves sharing all of the insane stories we have from APAC, where model rates are decided by the colour of their skin, and where outrageous stereotypes or even brown-face are still commonly seen in TV and advertising. It was liberating for all of us to share these issues to an audience who did actually see that it was atrocious, and I think refreshing to talk to one another about what we’ve been through and how we could fight it in the future.

We got so wrapped up in our discussion we missed the next talk.

After the daily regroup (to vent/ask questions/share favorite moments), some of us headed over to Meta Beach. We laughed, danced a little, ate a lot, cried together, and yes, we talked about boys. It was spectacular to hang out with the girls and remember that underneath all of their incredible strength and creativity was still just kind people with open hearts and real lives. I know it seems terribly obvious, but I think it’s easy to forget that we’re all just human beings. We have a lot more similarities than differences.

Talking to the girls about our shared insecurities, as well as our personal accomplishments, brought us all closer together. I heard a lot of “I was shocked to get in”, but each woman I talked to was so fiercely intelligent, creative, and open-minded, it was obvious that each and every one of them belonged here.?

Which meant admitting that I probably did too.?

Day 3 >