Ticket to Cannes

We could barely wait for the competition under Dani komunikacija (Days of Communication) Festival, because at the first Young Lions competition in Croatia held last year we won the second and the third prize. 

Bring the Chicken for the Lions

We arrived to Cannes! Eight days of great events, lecturers and associating with the world’s best creative people were ahead of us. The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity offers a comprehensive programme and whether you are a veteran or you visit for the first time, it is important that your daily schedule is carefully planned. Of course, we downloaded the festival application immediately. Beside attending excellent lectures, we spent the most time in the networking zones. The place you can’t miss is also the beach of Cannes with its numerous bars in the residence of the world’s greatest companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Shazam...

The Young Lions Competition

The first Young Lions Competition in Cannes was held back in 1995 and it offered a great opportunity for the best creative people under the age of 30. The largest number of participants in the history of the Competition gathered this year, and the competition categories were cyber, design, film, marketers, media, PR and print., 47 teams from all over the world participated in our category, cyber. After 24 hours of work and lack of sleep we had a good solution in our hands. We didn’t win the first prize, but as a good team we returned very quickly in a festival, investigative mood. Even more important, during both competitions we became aware of our own creative capacities. The Competition in Cannes showed us that good ideas mostly arise from a fight with limited capacities and challenges. Sometimes we obviously have to create those limitations by ourselves in order to efficiently solve real problems using ideas.

Lectures

Since we were interested in the cyber area which brought us to Cannes, we were focused on attending lectures that offer relevant and inspiring ideas on contemporary processes of the leading agencies. Our favorite two lectures were:

1. Disruption by Design: Creating the Next Agency Model - R/GA

Inspiring Bob Greenberg, Nick Law, Barry Wacksman and Saneel Radia explained through their own example the newest transformational R/GA agency model, in which they combine innovative consulting, technology, design and communication with the leading Venture Studio, in order to enable competitive advantage to their clients. Using their own example, they pointed out that nowadays the important fact for agencies and clients is to be adaptable to the changes in market demand. The most important thing is to create new values using innovation. 

2. Creativity for Business Innovation by Dentsu

We enjoyed listening to Dentu’s creative directors Yasuharu Sasaki and Kazuhiro Shimura, which outlined the contemporary working methods of the agency. The concept of "seed creativity" represents a process of the creative development of every project which was designed from the beginning in a way that a client and the agency create the unique, collaborative team of professionals. The idea of such a model is to collaboratively create a model of innovative business development using innovative ideas.

Yasuharu and Kazuhiro presented the "OPEN ROAD" project in which they have been involved for many years, developed on the principle "seed creativity” for the Toyota Motors company.

Beside the mentioned ones, we would like to bring up a few more lectures which we found useful and interesting:

• Branded Podcasts: An Engaging, Effective and Subtle Brand Marketing Powerhouse
  
• Lars Silberbauer: The LEGO® Social Media Journey
  
• Mobile-Only Pioneers: What's Next (IAB)
  
• Juan Manuel Santos: A Farewell to Arms
  
• The Case for VR: Should We or Shouldn't We?
  
• Telling a Good Story: Ian McKellen with The Brooklyn Brothers
  

The Winners

While examining the finalists’ works exhibition, we concluded that it is really difficult to win the “Lion”. To put it briefly no less than 41.170 works entered for this year’s festival. Long hours were put in every project and every prize accompanied by the trust of the client and the agency.  

The following three campaigns were the most impressive for us among all the finalists:

Conclusion

The Festival programme was focused on diversity and problems encountered by creative industries, which are mostly prejudices and stereotypes. Entered works proved that the great changes with positive effects are happening in market. During the Festival programme digital technology dominated in all areas, a fact which was demonstrated by numerous campaigns which made a creative breakthrough in that area.

This Competition was definitely one of the best experiences in our lives. It was intense and exhausting, but extremely inspiring. We learned a lot and filled ourselves with energy for new challenges.

See you again in Cannes next year!