By day three, the Academy had settled into a rhythm. Names no longer needed repeating, and last night’s stories were already being retold with increasing levels of creative embellishment.

Particular amusement was derived from the phrase, “Let’s grab a drink at Salesforce.”
It remains difficult to explain why this is funny. It simply is.

Somewhere along the way, a room full of strangers had become friends. Which was fortunate, because the day’s sessions turned out to be about one of the more uncomfortable aspects of creativity: having an idea and then showing it to other people.
Ste Rogers got the ball rolling by suggesting that anxiety and creativity are not, as many of us have assumed, sworn enemies. Anxiety, he argued, is a fairly natural response to stress.

The antidote is to be prolific. Your job is to produce ideas. Lots of them. Hundreds, if possible. Someone else can worry about which one deserves to live forever. Anxiety thrives on scarcity. It has a much harder time making a fuss when there are fifty more ideas waiting in the wings.

The same theme surfaced later in a session from Sabina Hesse and Chris Graves. They tackled a question that tends to arise whenever one encounters particularly bold work.

Not, “How did they think of that?”

“How did they manage to sell that?”

This, it turns out, is where much of the real adventure lies. Good ideas require persuasion, patience and the ability to help nervous clients imagine a future in which saying yes turns out rather well. One of the more useful observations of the day was that being boring carries its own dangers. Nobody commissions a cautionary tale about excessive imagination.

Then came Jenny Glover, whose session on creative voice contained perhaps the most accurate career advice I’ve heard all week. Having a unique voice is a gift. Lean into it and spend time in spaces that support it.

A creative career, she said, is rather like bathing a cat.

There will be resistance. There may be blood. At least one participant will question how things came to this. Yet beneath the chaos was a simple point. The qualities that make you odd are often the qualities that make your work memorable. If a room refuses to hear your voice, there is little point shouting louder. Better to find another room.

Later, Ben Miles walked us through the Design Lions judging process. We debated work through the lenses of idea, impact and craft, discovering that great work is rarely the result of a single flash of genius. More often, it is the result of people who have the ambition, as well as the means to do better, deciding to commit to a shared goal.

Having followed Cannes Lions from afar for a few years, I couldn’t help noticing that PR seems to occupy an increasingly interesting corner of the festival. Perhaps that’s because audiences have become remarkably skilled at ignoring things they didn’t ask for. More and more of the work being celebrated doesn’t interrupt people so much as involve them. It asks for participation rather than attention, which feels like a subtle but significant shift.

By evening, those ideas had acquired a soundtrack.

At the PR Lions, teams walked onto the stage to collect their awards while Fontaines D.C. thundered around the room and entire rows leapt to their feet. From the balcony, I found myself cheering for an Academy classmate and a former colleague among the winners.

It was equally striking to see leaders like Anupriya Acharya, Dana Tahir and Sindhuja Rai presiding over the judging process. Winning stops feeling like a distant fairy tale when you can see people who look like you, sound like you, or come from places like yours helping shape the industry.

By the end of the day, ideas had to be made. Then shared. Then sold. Then defended. Then trusted enough to let loose on the world.

If you’re lucky, they’re celebrated.