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CANNES, France—The brightest young minds of the advertising world come together each year for the Cannes Young Lion Competition. This year, we asked the two participants representing Team USA, Rachel Findlay and Jessica Nugent, to share their experience.
Day 1: We’re in Cannes
Between the hot sun and the beauty of the Croisette, the Cannes Lions experience is exciting and overwhelming. But that’s to be expected as reps of Team USA in the Digital category of the Young Lions Competition. We’ll have 24 hours from the briefing to concept an answer with a one-page visual summary and, later, a presentation.
While there are so many talks and events we want to attend, our Young Lions responsibilities takes precedence. We had a full day scheduled, first with some competition programming, an NCM welcome party and our briefing to kick off the event.
Our topic: the climate crisis. Our confidence level: high. But it didn’t stay that way. We spent some time marking the brief to ensure we understood exactly what we needed to make. The clock was ticking, and our work was just beginning.
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Day 2: An object in motion
It’s 4 a.m. and we’ve been at it for 12 hours tossing around ideas, questioning why and how and is it good enough. Two Red Bulls in and we’re fading fast. One of us wants to push through until the morning. One of us wants to sleep. We toss “I know you’re going to hate this but….” and “What if we were the first to…” back and forth, but nothing is sticking. We start regretting our lives, the choices that brought us here.
Jess takes a sleep break around 5 a.m. and Rachel powers through on creating the visuals for the one-pager. At 6 a.m. Rachel decided to lay down, but being an object in motion (tending to stay in motion), her eyes were wide open and her mind was still on the brief.
9 a.m. rolls around and we’re locked in at the Adobe competition area (literally and figuratively). Teams of two from every corner of the world were doing exactly what we were doing. The feeling inside was familiar; it was the same kind of tension that exists in agency life when every team is slammed and deadlines are approaching fast. It was comforting that this felt like a normal situation, except this time we are up against 50 teams with very different backgrounds and way more points of view.