Matty Burton’s Cannes Diary #1: Love
Matty Burton, group chief creative officer at DDB Group Aotearoa is representing New Zealand on the Cannes Brand Experience & Activation jury. Burton, along with most of the other New Zealand and Australian jurors, writes exclusively for CB.
Day One – Love.
This is a love story. A love that sometimes you forget exists and then you catch a glimpse of it again making you feel something deep and visceral.
I’m in a little room, with nine other jurors led by our president Anselmo Ramos, the Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of Gut.
I’ve heard about Anselmo before, I know people who have worked with him and now I’m surrounded by pizza boxes, empty beer bottles and various discarded wrappers at midnight on the very first night of judging getting an insight into just how special this guy is.
We’ve been in this room for 15 hours and nobody is tired. Nobody has complained. And everybody is surprised when someone mentions the time. I feel like I only just walked in.
That’s the thing about spending time with people who know what they’re talking about. People who love what they do. Who get excited by ideas no matter where they come from in the world and are willing to fight for a complete stranger’s work just because they see something in it.
And sometimes those people are clients too. If you ever wondered why there are so many award winning pieces from Heinz that have come into the world over the past little while then sitting in front of me is the answer.
Cecilia has a tattoo in red ink on her arm made from Heinz Ketchup, an idea that won here at Cannes a few years back. How many clients do you know that fucking love ideas so much they get them tattooed permanently on their skin?
It’s that kind of belief and that kind of understanding of ideas that sees me locked in a passionate debate about a piece of work with her. She’s right. And I’m also right. And we divide the room right down the middle.
We keep talking, looking at this piece from different angles. Everyone is chipping in. We read everything that is written. Someone searches it up online. We keep talking and we all get to a deep understanding of this one piece of work. It lives to fight another day and we move onto the next piece.
This is what I love. Being surrounded by smart, passionate, people who just fucking love ideas and the power of those ideas and what they represent. Even in a tiny little room. Even in the middle of the night. This is something special for which I am very grateful for.
We’re only at the shortlist stage but this is what it takes to get on the list. You have to pass the passion test. It’s not easy to pop your head up here. Only about 10% of the almost 3,000 entries in my category will do that by making the shortlist.
So when you see the work from Australia and New Zealand, which is some great work, make sure you celebrate it because it’s flying our flags and doing us all proud.