These Agencies Prioritized Sending Early-Career Creatives to Cannes

The Cannes Lions Festival has, historically, been a place where senior-level agency employees congregate to drink, network and vie for awards. Attending the event is harder for early-career advertisers. Budgetary concerns, and the sheer lack of relevant on-site opportunities for young people, create a barrier.

Some agencies and third-party industry organizations are pushing back on that barrier by sponsoring opportunities for young people to attend the festival. Selecting which early-career employees to send to the festival introduces other challenges, but it is one way industry bodies can do their part to support employee career trajectories and foster inclusion at the event.

Adweek spoke with first-time Cannes attendees and the organizations that sponsored their travel to learn more about their programs.

“From the outside looking in, I suppose you don’t see a lot of the other things that go on [at Cannes], other than the general awards that are given out,” said Conor Smith, a senior A/V designer at 26 agency and MSQ Young Lion who went to the festival this year for the first time.

Internal competitions at agencies

Agencies that send young creatives to the festival create internal competitions for employees. Media.Monks hosts its NextUp.Monks competition that its early-career creatives can compete in to win travel to Cannes, and more specifically, a seat at the Cannes Lions Academies program.

The Academies experience offers attendees classroom-style sessions, along with networking opportunities. The Creative Academy session admits just 30 creatives total.

“Having an internal competition across your global team to see not just who wants to go to Cannes, but who deserves to go to Cannes by winning a competition that tests their creativity, their response to a brief,” is a novel approach, Steve Latham, head of learning at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, told Adweek. Media.Monks works closely with Latham to build out a bespoke agenda for the handful of creatives it sends to the festival.

This year’s winners, Yazad Dastur, junior copywriter at Media.Monks, and Anna Zhang, junior designer at Media.Monks, responded to a brief for Meta that asked they imagine a unique VR experience for the company. As many as 300 Media.Monks employees across 25 countries responded to the brief.

“It’s really great to go to Cannes, but I feel like going to Cannes to be a part of a global cohort with creatives from all over the world is going to be so great,” Zhang told Adweek before the event.

The event was competitive, Dastur recalled. “You’re given a very open-ended brief, and you have to interpret it. You have to kind of come up with this idea very, very quickly,” he added.

Media.Monks isn’t the only agency sponsoring an opportunity like this. MSQ is a global collective made up of 11 agencies representing about 1200 people. This year, MSQ sent two creatives from the group to Cannes.

Every year, the collective’s creative council nominates three or three creatives from each agency, and a smaller team later selects two winners from the larger nominee pool to send to the festival.

MSQ offers an all-expenses-paid opportunity for those it sends, and provides its creatives with an on-site event coordinator. Matt Williams, global head of marketing at MSQ, took on coordination responsibilities this year. Williams created a detailed agenda to help young creatives navigate the large event, where on-site functions included dinners with MSQ agency CEOs and creative leads.

“If Cannes is all about inspiration, then that’s why we need the next generation to be inspired by it,” said Williams. “We don’t want our senior leaders running off to the hills for big swanky meals, and everyone else left on the Croisette to fend for themselves,” he added.

The Young Lions event

Some agencies hold internal competitions for young creatives, but with the aim of submitting winning work to the Cannes Young Lions competition. This was the case for Julian Amarillo, creative art director at the creative agency Gut and Haroldo Moriera, creative copywriter at Gut.

The duo responded to a fictional Michelob Ultra brief imagined by Gut and sponsoring organizations including Círculo de Creatividad Argentina and FilmSuez. Participating creatives had 48 hours to respond to the brief, at which point an appointed jury judged the projects.

After winning the internal competition, the two secured tickets to Cannes, but because Gut submitted their winning work for judging, they were also up for an award at the festival.

“We haven’t been to Europe and we haven’t been in Cannes, and this is like a dream for us,” Moriera told Adweek before leaving for the event. Moriera and Amarillo represented Argentina, which was top of mind for them during the competition. This year, Young Lions creatives hailed from a record-breaking 70 countries.

At Cannes, the duo did not win the Young Lions award. However, they did win the Grand Prix award for their work on the Stella Artois’ spot, “The Artois Probability.” That spot also won two Gold and two Silver Lions. Amarillo and Moriera’s home office, Gut Buenos Aires, won the Independent Agency of the Year and Agency of the Year awards. It was the first year the Gut team in Argentina had ever won at Cannes.

Gut leadership told the creatives, “This is a big opportunity for you and we believe in you, so we are going to submit you,” Moriera recalled.

Industry orgs can step up, too

Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, brought a team of five early-career creatives to the festival this year. He sought online creators with large social media followings that either work at agencies now or had in the past. Part of their on-site responsibilities included reporting on various Cannes events from a sustainability lens.

Clean Creatives put out an open call for applications and asked those interested to submit their interest via Google form. Successful applicants prioritized inclusivity and looked at climate change from an intersectional perspective.

“It can be difficult to show up as a young person. We recognized how senior it can feel, how exclusive it can feel,’ said Meisel of the festival.

UK-based talent development organization Digilearning, teamed up with Brixton Finishing School and Lollipop Mentoring to offer a Cannes experience to select people from underrepresented backgrounds. Those that qualified to apply had already completed Digilearning’s professional development courses.

The three organizations covered expenses for those they brought on-site. The experience included event tickets, accommodations, and a daily stipend for food. the organizations helped them set specific goals they could complete while there, and agendas included a session with Teads, a panel about work/life balance, meetings with Accenture leaders and a networking meeting with Trade Desk employees.

It’s always been seen as this elitist [event] that all the leaders go to. We just wanted to make it so much more inclusive,” Digilearning founder Lisa Goodchild told Adweek.