For anyone who’s ever spent the afternoon at Val Morgan’s infamous lunch held at La Guérite on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, about 15 minutes by boat from Cannes, what goes on in the jury rooms may come as something of a shock.
Patrons of the beach club-restaurant, with its Greek-Mediterranean menu, famous for lunches that start civilised and end with people dancing on tables to a live DJ by 4pm, is as far from the dark air-conditioned rooms where the awards are actually decided.
At the Advertising Council of Australia’s Cannes Download in Sydney, Bear Meets Eagle On Fire founder Micah Walker (Film), Revolver EP and partner Pip Smart (Film Craft) and Motion Sickness ECD Sam Stuchbury (Creative B2B) sat down with moderator Brent Smart (who also was a juror for the Creative Effectiveness panel) to tell what really happens once the jury room door shuts.
For those agencies paying the thousands of Euros to enter their work fir the first time, the might be shocked to know most work is dead before anyone argues about it.
“The hardest part is just making the shortlist,” Walker said, with thousands of Film entries culled before the debate even starts. His advice for the 20,000-odd entrants next year was blunter still — a job well done isn’t enough. If it doesn’t stand up in the first 30 seconds, it fades.
Pip Smart, president of Film Craft jury, refused to play God with a casting vote. Deadlocks got thrown back to the room to fight again — a discipline that produced Coinbase’s ‘My Way Out’ as Grand Prix, a film she reckons was lifted entirely by the director’s hand.
Walker’s pick was Anthropic’s Claude campaign — “the Claude stuff is f—ing great” — a real, achievable brief nailed at every decision: right director, right cast, right writing. He wasn’t blind to the irony of an AI company winning with defiantly human craft, and his jury drew a hard line on AI entries: if it could’ve been made traditionally, it didn’t belong.
The best blues were in B2B. The much-lauded Faroe Islands space program for a ball bearings manufacturer nearly died in the room, with jurors grumbling the agency invented nothing — it just packaged innovation the client already had. Stuchbury reckons that was the whole trick: “They didn’t invent it, but they made it a much bigger thing than it was.” Over in Film Craft, celebrity casting caused its own hand-wringing — is it fair to pit Emma Stone’s money against an unknown’s face?
Stuchbury also brought the yarn of the week: presenting the shortlisted “Māori Roll Call” live to a jury that had never heard of a haka — or a Māori roll call — straight after someone else’s presentation on the Pope and Gaza. They opened with a haka anyway. It woke the room, and the Whānau Ora campaign went on to win two Golds, including New Zealand’s first-ever Gold Glass Lion. Stuchbury then talked the agency’s Head of Māori Culture, Kātene Durie-Doherty, onto the Palais stage: “I’m not going to be the white guy to tell you to do the haka — but if you’re not doing it because you’re nervous, you should just do it.” Cue the first haka in Cannes Lions history, in front of 2,000 people in the Lumière.
Parting wisdom? Craft the case film like it’s the idea itself, enter thinner categories — Pip Smart tips VFX and colour grading over the bloated direction field — and remember the Creative Effectiveness brief that should hang over all of it: award work your mum loves. Everything else is award fodder.
