Breakfast Epiphanies: These Are Our Cannesfessions

Image from i OS
  • Text Eli Williams & Clara Malley

Day One is reporting live from the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Tune into Day One FM daily for a special edition of the podcast from Eli and Clara — “Breakfast Epiphanies” — where they break down the Croisette’s highs and lows.

These Are My Z Cannesfessions

We started the morning off at ZCannes—the Riveria offshoot of ZCon—with a panel featuring Crosscheck Studios co-founder Josh Richards and Gymnasium founder Adam Faze on how they’re building digital companies like modern-day TV studios. I was struck by the tricky line you need to walk between being highly critical and interactive with your work to make it hit on social, while at the same time trusting the concept and maintaining the integrity of the idea.

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Good Things For Poor Things

The production designers behind Poor Things—Shona Heath and James Price—walked through the references and thought process behind their Oscar-winning sets. A couple of my favorite anecdotes were the Cubist paintings that inspired Dr. Baxter’s facial scars and the surreal vignettes that ended up making their way to the chapter title cards as Bella travels from London to Lisbon and Paris. Easily my favorite of the week.

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No Mercy, No Malice, Lots of Colorful Metaphor

The Collins House hosted Scott Galloway and “the Lions king” Michael Kassan. Highlights included Michael’s redux on the evolution of the Cannes Lions over the past 20 years (with vague allusions to his fraught exit from UTA) and revisiting Scott’s “the brand era is over” thesis. Scott also predicted X’s Cannes apology tour will flop—agree—and called out the irony of tech companies’ cheerful presence at Cannes, contrasted with the negative effects of their algorithms: “They’ll stroke their hands through your hair and then shoot you in the face.” Love him or hate him, he has a truly admirable flair for the spoken word.

A Few Misc. Observations

  1. We stumped upon these “creatives are the next athletes” shirts over the course of the week. 100% guarantee these dudes have all the dirt bag keywords (eg. “worldbuilding” ) in their IG bio.

  2. I highly suggest reading up on the “Test-icles”: a truly inspired pair of PSA characters whose toothy grins, spindly arms and whimsical hijinks have stayed with me all week long.

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