Cannes Young Lions Competition: A Week Packed Into 48 Red-Eyed Hours

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.

Usually, on brief with a quick turnaround, we’re able to go to our creative directors with multiple ideas, albeit half-baked at best, but together discussing several to keep pushing on.

Around 2 p.m. we were near our breaking point. Time to send.

Logic would tell you we should take a nap or sleep but, naturally, we decided to attend part of an awards ceremony and a session with Marc Pritchard of P&G. He was an amazing presenter and said every word with such confidence.

It could have been the creative or it could have been Rachel’s state of mind, but her eyes welled up with tears at almost every commercial. It was probably the creative.

Finally, it was naptime.

We met again to catch the tail end of a Grey happy hour to thank our assigned mentors from Grey for helping us prior to the Young Lions Competition. We caught Laura Maness as she was leaving to collect a Grand Prix award they had just received.

Next, it was a mix of TBWA happy hour to see some more familiar faces from Chiat. We chatted with Kirsten Rutherford, Brent Anderson, Monica Gelbecke and Bruno Regalo.

Hungry and tired, we eat a great meal at Le Vesuvio. We order steak and salmon as a little reward. Afterward, we briefly go to an under-30 party along the beach. But there was still so much to do. We hadn’t even prepped for our presentation to the Jury. It felt like a week packed into 48 red-eyed hours, but that’s Cannes!

Pit stop at an under-30 party along the beach.Rachel Findlay and Jessica Nugent