James Greet: Pleased to Media [Day 5-6]

Sun – Mon, 19-20.6. The Best?

From small groups of 5/6 we're now going to be in a single room with all the jurors. For 2 days. And so the business of looking at a 'shortlist' to define the best begins.

The 'shortlist' of 212 is to be decided amongst a single group of all 30 of us. Is that humanly possible?

30 people from around the world, most of whom only met 4 days ago, have to discuss and agree who's worthy of recognition. Now I've always thought that the reason why you never see a statue of a committee is because no committee ever made a decent decision. Does Cannes really bust that trend? Guess the next 2 days will prove / disprove the theory.

Either way the notion of discussing 212 pieces of work seems arduous. And after only 3 days I'm already feeling the effects. I'm beginning to feel knackered. And no I haven't burnt the candle. It's just that by the time you get home after concentrating for 9 hours on end you're fried. Then you go and meet folk, eat, drink a bit, return to hotel to find Sydney awake, talk to people, read / send emails and next thing it's 1am. Bed, 6 hours sleep and you're staggering across the road to jump in the sea to wake up. And then you're on again. (OK so it sounds like an ordinary day in the office, with or without the sea bit so maybe I'm just getting old?!)

So we begin.

Because each of us has only seen about a fifth of all entries submitted there's quite  a few even on this shortlist that I haven't seen before. That helps stimulate you. But then even those you have seen you now see new things in. With so many entries to consume in the previous 3 days you might only have 5 minutes to view and read so not surprising that you observe something different second time around.

Bottom line is that with the success of Cannes, and rightly so, they'll only be more next year which is why Terry Savage is thinking along the right lines of more preliminary judging to ensure that the time spent in Cannes by jurors needs to be focused and able to digest the good stuff and not racing to fit numbers into too short a time.

2 days and 13 hours a day later and amazingly the process does seem to work. Without a shadow of a doubt we get to the point we're every piece of work that does deserve recognition receives a medal of some kind. No one who has genuinely delivered creative thinking that has helped grow a brand has gone unrecognised. And in the right order.

Significantly we are almost entirely unanimous in agreeing the Grand Prix. The Tesco's / Homeplus work in Seoul is genuinely a business changing idea. How to turn a medium (a poster) into a point of sale. And one that is valued by the public and achieves the Brand's business goals.

I wished I'd thought of that.

James Greet is on the Media Lions Jury. He is chief executive of Mindshare.