Rose Herceg’s Cannes Diary #3

Rose Herceg, president of WPP represented Australia on the Cannes Creative Strategy Lions jury. Herceg, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors, writes exclusively for CB.

Now we wait for the press conference and the awards ceremony. Both are on today – Thursday.

Plenty of people have asked me if theirs has won.
I can keep a secret better than anyone, so I say, “You’ll need to watch to find out”.

Once you’re a judge you’re in a special little family. I bumped into several of my fellow judges going to sessions and events and we hugged like we’d been to war together.

It’s a community of people who bond very quickly and very honestly.

No time for surface conversations – straight into the guts of what matters in the world. It’s an interesting observation. What people think about the work tells you how they are as people. Their politics, their context, their life. It might seem a tangential observation, but it’s probably a very accurate one.

Work comes in every stripe. The point of the work (political, social, environmental, commercial – and what people vote for) is a proxy for their individual value systems.

Today I race off to squeeze in as much as I possibly can. Meeting my WPP colleagues from around the world. Seeing the talks I really want to listen to, and bumping into old friends. This last one is the best.

For all the planning on Cannes, it’s the random meetings that provide the most joy.

My tip for anyone planning to come next year: keep your diary open to allow space for the unexpected.