This year 52 young marketers from 26 countries spent 24 hours tackling the challenge of our lives. Whether it was people, ideas or opportunities, the Young Lions Marketing Competition at Cannes certainly delivered on all fronts.
As soon as the starting gun sounded, we made our way down to basement of the Palais, a windowless, phoneless room that made up the competition arena. We soon became well acquainted with team Finland with whom we shared a slightly undersized desk.
The task: Partner with the International Rescue Committee, to develop a new product that leverages one of our employer’s brands (in our case Google or the Commonwealth Bank) to convince ‘anxious swing voters’ that our country should accept more refugees.
We weren’t the first group to try and crack this issue, and I’m sure we won’t be the last. However - I’m almost certain we were the first to be asked to do so with a budget of just $10,000. Given this budget would normally buy only us about half a banner ad - my teammate Jesse and I would need to lean on all the help we could get!
Thankfully over the first four competition-free days at Cannes, we’d picked up a few pieces of game-changing advice from some of Australia’s best creative thinkers. At the drop of a hat, people with much more impressive titles than ours, gave up their time and their advice over a coffee (or if I’m honest – it was usually rose). There’s nothing quite like being an Aussie abroad that brings people in marketing and advertising together.
These were a few of thoughts that helped guide the two of us through the (very) long competition night:
- Have a great tagline, if it’s not three words, it should be.
- Marketing can and should be the voice of the user when building a product
- Sell an idea with a story, not a slide deck
- Give your agency the creative freedom that comes with a tight brief
Then pitch day arrived. Thanks to Australia’s pioneering placement in the alphabetical ordering system, we were up first. As we wandered down to the Palais at 8:30am, we couldn’t help but feel just a little envy for team Turkey, Uruguay and Vietnam who no doubt enjoyed their sleep-ins.
Over five minutes, ten slides and a one page brief, we sold in a product idea from CBA that we called CompassionRate: a variable home loan rate that was directly tied to Australia’s rate of refugee resettlement.
We heard some amazing ideas from all over the world including my personal favourite, a Portuguese beer brand that offered to remove the label from its product in the hope it would prompt people to remove the labels they give refugees.
If I could only share one takeaway from our time at Cannes, I would paraphrase our prime minister: there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian. It’s certainly true in marketing, media and advertising. We Aussies are an incredibly creative group who definitely punch well above our weight on the world stage.
A massive thank you to the Cannes Young Lions organisers, to News Corp for sponsoring our trip and to our industry’s creative leaders who shared their time and insights to make sure that we did Australia proud on the day.
By Google product marketing manager Michael Stocks