The curators of the Cannes festival this year did a superb job pulling together a seminar, forums and workshop program that treated both marketing art and science with mutual curiosity and respect.
From the perspective of the attendee the week ebbed and flowed between the creative and science narrative like a 20 round heavyweight bout: with some rounds won on points by scientists selling an algorithmic vision of the future ,and other rounds won by artists painting stories using a 500,000 year old tool… human imagination.
The line-up was truly world class, featuring household names from advertising, science, media, arts and entertainment like Pharrell Williams, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Jamie Oliver, Sir John Hegarty, Sir Martin Sorrell, Al Gore, Brian Grazer, David Guetta, Richard Curtis, Jeff Goodby and too many others to name.
Each day dawned with an unspoken expectation the big insights and intellectual leaps would come from one of the famous names: surely Sir Tim Berners-Lee would melt brains with his speech on artificial intelligence or Pharrell Williams would soar with examples of creative process that could be applied in any agency?
By Tuesday however, whispers started to circulate around Cannes that a young designer from New York had floored a capacity audience in the 3,000 seat Grand Audi Theatre. By Thursday, she was slightly famous with people who aren’t designers.
Jessica Walsh: art director, designer and partner at Sagmeister & Walsh is a name you should know. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and has won awards from most major design competitions (Type Director’s Club, Red Dot, Art Director’s Club et. Al). She was also recognized by Forbes magazine in their “30 under 30 greatest makers”, and her clients include Jay Z, The New York Times, Adobe and Levis... I have added her contact details in my phone under “Ridiculous Over-Achiever”.
If you get the chance to watch her speech online you’ll see examples of innovative client work and observe a presentation structure that reinvents the use of video, but what you won’t see (or in this case hear), the collective in-take of breath from 3,000 people when she shared her personal artistic projects.
Which is really what Cannes is all about. Never knowing what is around the next corner, or which relative unknown is going to steal the show.
By Tim Flattery
Head of business development and diversified services at MEC