Annabel Acton’s Cannes Diary #1

Annabel Acton, strategy director at Deloitte Digital is representing Australia on the Cannes Creative Business Transformation Lions jury. Acton, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors, writes exclusively for CB.

Before arriving in Cannes, we judged around 250 entries individually. No doubt everyone had their own system – but mine involved logging results in the portal directly, then keeping a separate spreadsheet with my scores, comments and questions. I then revisited category by category, and also triple checked anything I’d marked particularly high or low, ensuring I felt justified in my rationale. Soon after being nominated as jurors, we were given bias training, so scouring my scores for any unconscious bias was another part of my motivation for another look.

Before arriving, we also met as a jury team to discuss what constituted creative business transformation. As it’s a relatively new awards category, quickly gaining momentum and interest, part of our job is to define what it really means. The piece that stuck out for me was that creative business transformation should evolve consumer and category expectations forever. The best examples involve looking at a hard problem and using bold swathes of imagination to solve it in a way that shifts the paradigm entirely. In this sense, it’s far more than a great campaign or activation. There’s a permanence to its impact, that resets consumer expectations, breaks limiting category definitions and keeps competitors moving forward.