Young Lions.
M+C Saatchi art director Laura Murphy and copywriter Amy Morrison made their way to the Cannes Lions festival of creativity and told AdNews their experiences.
They won Advertising Council Australia (ACA) 2025 Young Lions competition with their digital work 'Fast-er Food' and have gone to represent Australia at the Cannes global stage.
The peaks, pits and papayas (i.e. surprises) of our days at Cannes Lions 2025.
Day 1:
Peak: Cruising on the FINCH yacht and hanging out with the team who were about to get on stage for the Grand Prix for Good for Herpes NZ.
Pit: discovering even as an Aussie we cannot handle the heat. Shoutout to every brand that handed out tiny fans.
Papaya: Hearing the passion of the AXA three words glass lions jury pitch (who we later got to see take out titanium gold - best in show)
Day 2:
Peak: wondering around the basement of the Palais. Being left speechless taking countless pictures of our favourite shortlisted work. A blissful space that’s inspiring, quiet and airconditioned.
Pit: An unsuccessful new sandal debut resulting in $100 spend in bandaids (and counting.)
Papaya: Our brief. We got unexpectedly riled up about how honeybees get all the attention but it’s the wild bees that need us! And we need them.
Day 3:
Peak: Hitting submit on our AirBnB idea. Heading to dinner to celebrate M+C Saatchi’s 30th Anniversary and meeting our generous leaders from across the world.
Pit: the scheduled midnight spiral. But fear not we went back to delusional optimism at 2am when we locked in our AirBnBee idea.
Papaya: finding out you can put backpack cameras on bee’s and see the world as they fly. Highly recommend watching (yes this is what brought us out of our spiral).
Day 4:
Peak: Having lunch in Antibes with the generous team at MOFA amongst a great group of female talent, was the perfect way to find out we made the top 10 shortlist.
Pit: the pit in our stomach waiting for the shortlist. We knew the wait time for Ubers was +20 minutes so we ordered one before we even knew we made the shortlist. That’s the power of manifesting.
Papaya: it was delightful running into the wonderful Charlotte Berry and hearing about the incredible See It Be It program over an Aperol. Cheers to changing the industry for the better!
Day 5:
Peak: Taking out a podium placement and ranking third in the world for Young Lions - Digital.
Pit: the gutter bar is a physical pit but can’t pretend we didn’t have a wonderful time.
Papaya: the genuine friends we’ve made along the way. From our peers across the world, to our talented superiors, and of course our own Aussie Ibis agency - Creativity truly connects us.
The whole week emphasised over and over again that diversity of thought across different genders, ages, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds is truly more important than ever.
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