Toby Pickford’s Cannes Diary #3

Toby Pickford, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Health is representing Australia on the Health & Wellness Lions jury at Cannes Health Lions. Pickford, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors writes exclusively for CB.

It’s all hi-tech here

We go in, sit down, look at work, vote, look at more work, have coffee, eat a pastry, look at work, vote, analyse, have another pastry, drink a coffee, look at more work, vote, stretch and look at more work and vote. Sound boring? No way, it’s amazing!

Seeing the effort that everyone puts into judging the work makes me proud to be part of this industry. We all know the blood sweat and tears that have gone into getting it to this standard – and that’s what makes this job super tough when it comes to culling it down.

Tech is certainly trending here and it’s interesting to see that its filling the functional role where as traditional communication is definitely owning more of the emotional territory. I haven’t seen a piece of tech or code that’s made us cry yet. Except for when we had to go and revote 15 case studies at the end of the session due to a small tech issue.

So, this is life in the Cannes Lions Health & Wellness lab folks. It’s hard, its long, but it’s rewarding and certainly a huge privilege.

Tomorrow is the day we have to whittle these entries down now and start to think about Lions.