My Experience As An Unexpected Cannes Lions Juror

It goes without saying that all of the writing here only reflects my personal views and not those of any organization or other person unless explicitly expressed.

The Invitation

On March 20, Lisa Berlin , Global Jury Director for Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity , reached out on LinkedIn with a nice private message to invite me be part of the Entertainment Lions for Music jury.

The gravity of this opportunity was entirely lost on me, because I had, at this point, stopped going to conferences, and for years before that, stopped caring about awards and awards shows of any kind.

I did not know that the juror position was coveted, and that some in advertising considered this event to be their Oscars equivalent. A fellow juror even told me later that she had dreamed of going ever since she was a teenager (I felt a little ashamed to have taken this opportunity so flippantly).

I accepted.

Online Voting

During this waiting period, I was given 200+ works with a music or music collaboration focus in various categories to evaluate and score on an online portal (some of these did not overlap with my fellow Music jurors - I assume this means that more than 300 works were entered).

Some of these were embarrassingly bad, but once in a while, a work would appear that was akin to a cold drink of water after an interminable trek through a desert.?

After narrowing it down to a group of 67 entries that made up a tentative shortlist, we had to vote online again in greater detail to determine which of these would eventually make it into our final shortlist, which was trimmed down to 30+ and released after our first day of onsite judging.

Crisis

And now it was time to go to Cannes. The beginning of the trip was a highly stressful disaster for me. Admittedly, I had not been dealing well with stress at the time, no doubt to a persistent depressive state that had been creeping up on me for 5 years.

I experienced a tightness in my right chest that I learned later on was my lung collapsing in on itself - A spontaneous primary pneumothorax that, due to the flight and other stressors, eventually evolved into a tension pneumothorax that was pushing on my heart. I would spend the next 10 days marching toward a situation that could very well have turned fatal.

Still, I was looking forward to Paris.

Cannes

After a few fun and literally breathless days in Paris that were far more polite than most propaganda would lead one to believe, I took a 6-hour train ride down to Cannes, where a chauffeur ferried me to the famous Hotel Martinez.

In its lobby was an exhibit I instantly recognized as a Damien Hirst - famously loved by wealthy art collectors and hated by most artists, the ultimate symbol of commercial art.

It was certainly appropriate for an advertising festival.

Conclave

On the first day, we whittled down our list of 60+ pre-shortlisted entries to 30+ pieces that would be announced as the official shortlist, by going through the lowest-scoring works and eliminating everything that we could generally agree did not match up to the other pieces.

There was a fair amount of arguing (I certainly participated), emotions on full display, and active filling of cultural gaps where the works demanded an understanding of specific historical and national context for a proper evaluation.?

It was at this stage that I experienced, in person, for the first time in my life, why it is so important to have different views at the table. There were pieces that, had they not had passionate advocates, would have died. And there were pieces that, had their insensitive and condescending colonial context been revealed, would have made it through.

It was an uncomfortable room - reasonable but difficult questions were asked, we were forced to truly think outside of ourselves to see truth, and I for one was grateful for this mental exercise and for my fellow jurors, who caused me to see things in new and culturally-informed ways.

White Smoke

On the 2nd day, we needed to cull the shortlist by 50% based on a simple rule - was this worthy of any award at all? We each proposed 3-4 pieces that were our favorites to win a bronze at least, and voted on them till we reached 16 pieces worth at least a bronze or better.

From that, we chose 8 that were worth a silver or better. From those, 3 that were a gold or better, and from the golds, 1 Grand Prix - the piece that we thought ticked all the boxes and represented the best of what Cannes Lions should stand for.

The Grand Prix

I want to talk about the Grand Prix winner in the Music Category: Errata at 88, by Johnnie Walker. This campaign celebrated the genius of a woman long ignored by history and industry, widely regarded as one of the founding mothers of Bossa Nova - Alaide Costa.?

Many will be familiar with the most popular versions of this genre and its soft, genteel, sophisticated sound. It is unironically used as elevator music in expensive hotels, and often denotes "classiness".

Its most famous composers were white men, and the most famous Bossa Nova piece was written in 1967 - The Girl From Ipanema - A voyeuristic ode to the beauty of a 17 year old girl, unaware she was being watched by two married men, each more than twice her age and old enough to be her father: Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Vinicius de Moraes.

With this cultural context and background, it should not come as a surprise then, that the elevation of this music came at the expense of a Black woman whose work played a huge part in defining its eventual form and success. Despite her monumental abilities - she was largely ignored as Bossa Nova became a worldwide phenomenon.

When I listened to her voice, a chill went down my spine as I realized what I was hearing. In an instant of almost archeological wonder I heard the early courtship of Fado and Samba that would birth the Bossa Nova that we know and love.?

I had never heard of Alaide Costa in college, only the simplistic explanation that Bossa Nova was a fusion of Samba and Jazz. This was a claim that I simply took at face value for many years.

And yet - I was so wrong.

For a brand to right this injustice and possibly rewrite modern music history is not something that happens often. And it was this collaboration, one that changed a woman’s life in real, measurable ways, after 70 years of living with unfairness despite her significance, that we chose to reward as a jury.

Advertising

Advertising exists to do one thing: Sell.

It creates want and need where none existed before, it makes women feel inadequate so they will purchase beautification, it makes men feel inadequate so they will purchase a large and impractical truck they cannot afford.?It has long made us desire alcohol, cigarettes, diabetes-inducing sugary drinks, all the while hiding behind a thin veil of culture and sincerity.

Advertising takes cultural moments and seeks to turn them into profit.

It will tell you that Black Lives Matter in February while they attempt to engage Black influencers for free, and that they are proudly gay in June while their own clients lobby against those same rights.

I have no love for it, but I understand why we do it.

We all live together in a capitalist hellscape and your average working person has no power to change that. I need to eat too. I need a place to live. Some have children to feed, and so we participate in this hamster wheel of consumerism that we might survive.

But once in a while, with great difficulty and great luck, an agency and a client come together on something truly historic, that does create positive change, and that does say something important.

Of course, their brand benefits and their profit goes up, but hoping for anything purer than that in this particular industry is futile.?

Advertising is here to stay.

We should celebrate and encourage the very best of it, and use what power we have to make it so that the voices we want to hear speak loudly and stick around.

Because I know that in the industry’s desert of meaning lie a few rare and fragile oases we must preserve. The flower that blooms atop a heap of compost is still a flower, and just as beautiful or even more so than the flower that stands amidst thousands of others in a beautiful field.

Would I Do It Again?

100 times over.

Well, maybe not that many times, but definitely more than once.

A special thank you to Juan Woodbury and Henrique Tanji for the photos.