Pharrel Williams Made Me Happy, Happy, Happy but Cindy Gallop, Wendy Clark, Piera Gelardi and Jessica Walsh Inspired Me

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Maddy Kramer, Miami Ad School Graduate, Shares her Cannes Lions Experience

This is the follow-up to Maddy's earlier post: It's Just Like the Cannes Film Festival but instead of Brad Pit, Dave Droga will be there.

Maddy Kramer and 11 other outstanding creative women from all over the world were selected to participate in the See It Be It initiative at the Cannes Lion Festival. These dozen rising, young stars had three, cram-packed days of inspiration from some of the brightest minds on the planet. Find out what inspired Maddy most.

left photo: Maddy (middle) with Cindy Gallop (right), founder of MakeLoveNotPorn & If We Ran the World
right photo: Maddy (far left) with Marcello Serpa, (the really tall guy)

Day 1 

Non-stop and accelerating. We did tours around the jury rooms where we met the mobile jury and Keith Reinhard. The "real mad man” told us how persistence is the key to success. He then mentioned that, "Sometimes being curious and persistent is much more important than being talented." He also believes that if advertising didn’t exist he would've been the one to invent it. We met Wendy Clark, Senior Vice President of Coca-Cola, Global Sparkling Brand Center, and President of the Jury of Creative Effectiveness. Her inspiring advice was, "Stop trying to have a work life balance and start integrating your life with your work." We finished the night at happy hour with the Glass Lion Jurors. Like I said, non-stop day.

Day 2

We started with a seminar listening to Jessica Walsh designer, art director and partner at Sagmeister & Walsh. Her best advice was, “The more fun and play in my work the better people respond to the end result.” Afterwards we ran to meet Adrian Grenier, Entourage actor and creator of shft.com, a platform to convey a more sustainable approach to the way we live. We followed up with a mentorship "speed dating” session. We each got to chat with three talented, admired people for 15 minutes.

I spoke with Piera Gelardi (Executive Creative Director and Co-Founder of Refinery29), Mark D'Arcy (VP, Chief Creative Officer of Facebook Creative Shop) and Sylvia Vitale Rotta (CEO of Team Créatif in Paris). Their best advice was, "If you can’t find your perfect role in an agency go and create your own, change the game and make it yours."

Day 3

The day started with Pharrell Williams’ seminar. Right after we had lunch with Cindy Gallop, Founder and CEO of ifWeRanTheWorld and Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. She is hard to describe, when you listen to her you can feel her passion. Her energy is contagious and her "bad ass" personality is scary and courageous. Her best advice was, "If you want to make a change don’t wait for it to happen, just go out and do it. Be the one that changes people's minds." After a quick lunch we witnessed The Glass Lion press conference where we learned the winners and heard from the jurors. Marcello Serpa, Partner and Chief Creative at AlmapBBDO, underlined that it was the first time he felt like a minority in a jury and started to get conscious of his own gender. He began to realize how women might feel in a jury full of men. To finish an amazing last day of See It Be It, I shook Monica Lewinsky’s hand.

I have to say that the highlight was meeting my fellow See It Be It women who are creative, inspiring and talented. I left Cannes with 12 new friends from all over the world. They inspired me to make a change and I am ready to create conversation.

The talented, creative women selected for the See It Be It program at Cannes.

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