It’s day four at sunny Cannes 2015 and B&T’s two young cubs on the ground – Young Lion nominees Dan White and Simon Gibson from Clemenger BBDO (NSW) – share their adventures (during the day, not their evening ones). And like the pros they are the duo is avoiding the queues for the celebs and heading for the industry legends… 

Everyone saw Kim Kardashian yesterday and it seemed like everyone regretted wasting their time. We missed out, but we have managed to see some of the biggest names in advertising instead.

John Hegarty teamed up with Richard Curtis (the man who made every British rom-com) to tease us with a talk about their upcoming cinema ad equivalent of Sir Bob Geldof’s Band Aid. An ad aimed at publicising a commitment from the UN to tackle a long list of global issues from hunger to gender inequality. They’re aiming to run it in every cinema in the world on September 25^th, and they let slip that the spot features clay-mation animals representing every country in the UN. Given the team behind it, it probably won’t be the last time they are on a stage at Cannes for it.

Then we saw Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, two legends of American advertising. They got up and, for one hour, they reminisced about the highs and lows of their time running their agency. It wasn’t particularly structured. There was no clear outtake. No awkward agenda. Just two friends and business partners talking about the last 32 years and it was great. They played some of their favourite work. They talked about missing out on winning IBM due to one awkward elevator faux pas. We learnt a lot.

Four days into the talks, it seems a bit odd that this was really the first time we’d seen advertising people speak about advertising on the main stage. While some of the big names from outside the industry offered great insights, it was encouraging to see the legends of the industry outdoing the A-listers.