Kent Boswell’s Cannes Diary #2

Kent Boswell, creative tech and innovation director at The Hallway is representing Australia on the Cannes Digital Craft Lions jury. Boswell, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors, writes exclusively for CB.

4:34am. Wide awake!

After grabbing some fresh croissants from a local patisserie (“when in Rome”), it’s time for the Digital Craft jury to get locked away in a room under the Palais, so we can try to unearth the best-of-the-best from around the globe and hopefully set a new creative benchmark for 2024 in our category – no pressure!

As mentioned in my diary yesterday, the judging process has already seen the jury judge each piece of work individually over two Rounds (‘Round 1’ and ‘Round 2’). Our individual scores were then aggregated allowing us all to walk in this morning to have a proposed Shortlist waiting for us. It was so great to see all the ‘cream work’ has risen to the top and is now ready for us to scrutinise in fine detail as a group.

Getting to nerd out on all the best work with a bunch of people who are equally passionate is certainly a privilege that never gets lost on me. The jury I’m on has someone from each continent with ten different countries/cultures getting represented and each jury member bringing such an amazing perspective to the work.

Today’s mission was to lock the Digital Craft shortlist so we are then in a position to start awarding metal tomorrow. After going through all the work, we locked the official Shortlist (12 hours later) which will be getting announced in the morning at 9am (Cannes time).

I’m thrilled with the Shortlist we all landed on as it’s a great showcase of all aspects of our category. Huge congratulations to all the work that made it through.

Now the fun really starts – tomorrow we are awarding all the Lions. It will be interesting to see how the Grand Prix lands, as there are two solid contenders that are both very worthy to take out that elusive honour.