From OMA Grand Prix to Cannes: TBWA’s Tom Badge and Alana Wood make their Cannes debut
Fresh from winning the Grand Prix at the inaugural OMA Creative Awards for their ‘Welcome to Melbourne’ campaign for Specsavers, TBWA\Melbourne creatives Tom Badge and Alana Wood are experiencing Cannes Lions for the first time. Here, the pair share a glimpse into their first few days on the ground.
Writing a single diary entry of a day at Cannes feels simultaneously like you’re trying to document a 5-minute moment and an entire calendar year.
For Alana and I, this is our first time at the festival. Our large-scale airport trolling campaign for Specsavers managed to win the Grand Prix from the Outdoor Media Association awards, and as our reward, they gave us two tickets to Cannes to experience all it has to offer.
Every single moment is chock-full of activities, moving to a new activity, discussing the previous/forthcoming activity with your new/old friends, or urgently scanning through your poorly filed emails to find that QR code entry ticket that you’re absolutely sure you’ve got somewhere as you’re holding up the heatstroke-adjacent entry line, while the French locals laugh at you. They were likely laughing at other things but you just can’t be sure.
As young ambitious creatives, we set ourselves a rather impressive schedule of talks, events and activations to attend during our week. As I sit here halfway through day 3, I can safely say we’ve barely achieved half of what we set out to do – but we’ve been far from quiet.
We spent hours perusing the extensive catalogue of shortlisted work in the basement of the Palais Des Festivals, and honestly we could have spent most of this week reading through the insights and fresh ideas here. It’s so exciting seeing so many campaigns from all over the world be celebrated, for companies, problems and products that we’d never even heard of. We especially grew eagle-eyed when it came to sizing up our competitors in the categories we were shortlisted in — media and outdoor — but were swiftly humbled by the beauty and scale of the work. One campaign we particularly enjoyed was ‘Thanks for Coke-Creating’, celebrating local interpretations of it’s iconic logo by shopkeepers, artists and bodegas. We love the work that breaks what’s traditionally expected from a brand – protecting your brand identity down to the last digit in a hex code. So, to see Coca-Cola recognising these adaptations and shining a light on local communities across Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia and the United States, was brilliant.
Not only does the work inspire, but so too do some of the special guest speakers. We sat in the large Lumière theatre alongside thousands of other creative minds from around the world, reassured by Tor Myhren, VP of Marketing at Apple, of the value of human connection and insight in the world of AI. He referred to AI as a bionic arm, aiding human creativity, not replacing it. His words ‘there’s no algorithm more capable of making us feel than the human mind’ rang true as he pressed play on their Apple AirPods Hearing Aid spot, Heartstrings. The emotional 2-minute ad reflects the feelings of isolation that can come from hearing loss, made especially devastating through the lens of a family Christmas, ultimately solved using the Hearing Aid feature on his Apple AirPods. We left the theatre feeling warm and fuzzy, partly from the spot, and partly from the comfort that AI isn’t coming for our jobs just yet.
With the clock ticking down on our time in Cannes, both our schedule and the promenade itself are becoming more crammed. Meeting so many creatives from around the world, each bringing their local knowledge and flair, has us excited to make work that brings us back here soon.
