Video Production
A first Cannes Lions in full: the heat, the houses, the parties, the agency partnerships, and the experiential content we made on the ground.
Cannes Lions: a heatwave with a guest list
Sixteen dollars for a Diet Coke. Three outfits a day, every one of them soaked through. That was Cannes saying hello.
This was my first time at Cannes Lions, and France threw a heatwave on top of it. The portable fans and misters going around weren't swag, they were survival. (Might be our activation idea for next year.)
Most of our work happened outside, which the heat had real opinions about. I sweated through one outfit so badly I had to bail mid-day and buy a new one on the spot. The cheapest option within walking distance was Alo. It was that, Hermès, or Louis Vuitton, so I changed into athleisure and called it a steal.
The days of justifying that receipt to a boss are over, though. When you run the agency, the expense report is just a mirror. Small downside of being the one in charge.
The streets were packed. Every major brand had a house, a tent, a lawn, a bar, some reason to pull you in off the Croisette. Everyone you'd ever want to meet was out there somewhere, sweating through their linen like the rest of us.
We came to work. And we came to do it a little differently.
The assignment
We didn't fly to Cannes to hand out tote bags. We came to make things, fast, next to some of the most well-respected people in advertising.
The focus this year was experiential content and agency partnerships. The kind of work where you're embedded with a team, reading the moment in real time, and turning it into something people want to watch.
That meant teaming up with Raven Public Relations on two pieces, both hosted by the very talented Cate Jarrett. One was Cannes Closet Confidential, a street-level style segment. The other was a run of sit-down interviews with the team from Lola.
(Cate Jarrett - Photo by Tymel Young, Raised Media Co)
Cannes Closet Confidential
Part interview, part runway. Cate caught the ad world's best-dressed out on the Croisette to break down what they were wearing in Cannes and talk a little shop.
She made it look easy. We have never seen a crowd get attached to someone so fast. People became themselves around her, which is the entire trick to good vox pop.
A few of the names who stopped to show off their wardrobes included Jenny Rooney, Chief Brand and Community Officer at AdWeek; Maggie O'Connors, Chief Marketing Officer; Judith Carr-Rodriguez, CEO and partner at Fig; Kristen Cavallo, CEO of The Martin Agency; and yes, even Hollie Rapello, co-founder of Raven Public Relations couldn't miss the opportunity to showcase her stunning outfits that week.
Sitting down with Lola
The sit-downs went deeper. Cate spoke with the team from Lola, the agency behind the adidas "backyard legends" ad with Timothée Chalamet. JD Jurentkuff, their Chief Creative Officer. Jason Rappaport, Executive Creative Director. And Agathe Guerrier, the CEO. We'd written about that ad, so hearing the story firsthand had me quietly star-struck.
Some people fly across the world for five minutes with names like these. We got to spend real time with them, fumbling and bumbling and having a blast. No big deal.
Three conversations, three different flavors.
Jason walked us through Hero Gum, a project Lola built with Gift of Life, the registry that matches bone marrow and stem cell donors to blood cancer patients. Getting on that registry normally means needles or cheek swabs. Lola's idea was that a piece of chewing gum could pull the same genetic marker. LabCorp spent months proving it works, landed on Doublemint as the one that performed best, and it relaunched as Hero Gum in Mets orange, debuting at a Mets game. Chew for two minutes, mail the envelope, and you're on the registry. It has already produced a match in under a year. For Jason, who lost a parent to lymphoma, the work is personal.
JD got into Backyard Legends, the five-minute adidas World Cup film with Timothée Chalamet we'd been obsessed with for months. Twenty-plus months in the making, 22 days filming in Madrid plus a single day with Chalamet in LA, a cast running from Jude Bellingham and Lamine Yamal to CG-de-aged Zidane and Beckham. Chalamet improvised the Zidane moment, turning around to speak French, and it wasn't in the script. The film pulled 65 million views in four days and became adidas's best-performing social post ever. (He showed up in adidas Stan Smiths, staying client loyal.) JD's throughline was simpler than any of it: earn enough trust to sit on the same side of the table as the client.
Then Agathe, Lola USA's CEO, zoomed out to the philosophy holding it together. She launched the U.S. office in under 90 days, right before Backyard Legends dropped, and her read on the room at Cannes was that everyone's a little anxious about AI and shrinking budgets. Her answer is the mantra the whole agency runs on: crazy ambition makes serious things happen.
If the world is imposing crazy expectations on you, you're not going to overcome those by being reasonable. The only way to get there is to bring the crazy.
The JOAN House
Half the fun of Cannes happens on the pavement, and the Croisette turns into a stage for the brands that lean in. JOAN was a favorite. They set up a tent on the street with their name on it and ran a short skit gently poking fun at the bigger ad houses, and people walking by ate it up.
We were there to capture it, man-on-the-street style. They even pulled the owners of NBZ, co-founders Rachel Seagall and Simone Oppenheimer Mandel, in to join and network right there on the ground. Some brands went big with their presence. JOAN went small and human, and it landed. It's a good reminder that what makes a brand activation stand out isn't the size of the footprint. It's the size of the idea.
A tattoo by committee
Some of the best content finds you. We caught Jeff Benjamin, the Global CCO, aka wackypaki, from Tombras at the Pinterest activation, getting a tattoo his BYU students had voted on. A permanent souvenir, decided by committee, and exactly the kind of real moment we came to capture.
The drive
Pulling a week of content together in that heat was its own kind of chaos. The internet was slow enough that we'd film, drive back to the hotel to dump footage, then drive back across town to make the next meeting.
I didn't mind it. Every drive was another excuse to take in the city. We racked up the miles, but the views paid for the gas.
The heat fought us behind the scenes too. One of our cameras started overheating, so we cooled the cameras in a hotel refrigerator between sessions. Cannes in one frame.
Footage still moved fast once it was received. The Raven editing team back in the States turned same-day edits while we were out melting in the heat.
Sunsets at 11
The city didn't quit when the sun went down. If anything, Cannes found a second gear after dark.
Sunsets hit around 11pm, which never stopped being strange and beautiful. The light would stretch out over the water like the day refused to end.
After parties ran late at the Carlton's Bar 58. Ad Age threw a lawn party I was fully convinced was an all-white party, so I showed up dressed for a code that did not exist. Oops.
Yahoo had Tiësto perform. There were free pizzas going around at night, which after a day in that heat felt like a five-star meal.
One night we caught France playing in the World Cup, a tournament being hosted back in the US. There is something surreal about being an American in France, watching the French play a match happening in your own country. The crowd did not care where the game was. They cared that France was winning.
That's a wrap
For a first Cannes, it was a blast. The heat, the chaos, the who's who, the 11pm sunsets, all of it.
We came to make things differently, and we did. Experiential content, real agency partnerships, same-day turnarounds, and a whole lot of miles on a rental car.
Thank you to Raven, to Cate, to JOAN, to Lola, and to the countless others who joined in to make this one memorable.
This was great. See you next year.