Is the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity today’s holy pilgrimage?
Last night, after a blessedly dull 22-hour journey, I returned home to misty Portland from the scorching heat of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur in France. It was my first visit to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—the advertising celebration, not the film festival—even though I’ve been in and around the digital ad biz for more than two decades. This surprised folks, but I just never had a reason to go before. This time, work beckoned.
“How is your first Cannes?” Folks would ask. My reply was there was no “except for the heat” answer since the heat was debilitating: the hottest Cannes has ever been. Not just the hottest the festival has been: the hottest the small city of Cannes itself Had. Ever. Been. If my AirBNB had not been equipped with Air Conditioning, then I would have tapped out within hours.
However, after filtering for the two-to-four showers and outfit changes per day, the experiments with increasingly powerful sunblock, dropping the electrolyte tablets that La Profesora insisted I take into water and then forcing myself to drink them, as well as the sore feet from trudging (per my iPhone) 20,000 steps per day across the face of the sun, my first Cannes was pretty good. I met new people, got reacquainted with old friends, and met people in three dimensions whom I’d only ever seen on Zoom. In that odd conference Twilight Zone logic, I had visits with friends who live near me in Oregon because, well, we were there.
Cannes’ old town, Le Suquet, is a medieval city embedded in a modern luxury beach town, but it was a different bit of medieval history that kept running through my mind’s ear whenever I was out on the streets:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…
These are the first 11 lines of the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s great Middle English collection of stories, The Canterbury Tales. (You can listen to Chaucer scholar, Larry Dean Benson, read the opening lines of the prologue here and see a translation of all 858 lines here.)
The thrust of those lines is that, in fourteenth century England, when the weather turned fine in April, people of all classes would make pilgrimages to holy sites. Chaucer’s pilgrims visited the shrine of Thomas à Beckett in Canterbury, about 60 miles from London.
60 miles on horseback or mule back takes at least a few days, and it was soon clear that while some pilgrims had holy things on their minds, others just wanted to go on vacation. Over the course of the pilgrimage, different characters told their stories, and each story was a different take on the world.
Cannes is like that. The range of conversations I had in my days there was startling.
Over the years, the creativity festival, while still the excuse for lots of people going, has taken a back seat to advertising technology, with big tech players (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), consultancies (McKinsey, Bain, Accenture, C3 Venture), and publishers (The Wall Street Journal, AdWeek) creating big installations, smaller companies renting out yachts for events or temporary offices, and other folks scurrying from place to place for meetings that are easier to get when everybody is in one place. CES in Vegas is the same way each January.
At first, Cannes felt fake, confected, an act of will like the old Stanley Milgram “Street Corner” experiment where actors staring silently up at an unimportant spot on a building wall would gather other lookers who wondered what was up, and those lookers gathered more, and so on.
Then I realized that there’s a difference between fake and a self-fulfilling prophecy that, per Wikipedia, “is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person’s belief or expectation that the prediction would come true.”
That’s Cannes.
Despite how far away the La Croisette is from everything (three flights, minimum, from Portland) I would go again because the convenience of seeing that many people that efficiently is worth the inconvenience of the distance.
Except for the heat.
If you want to convert a climate change skeptic, then send them to Cannes in June.
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