Le journal de local #3 – Alex Little and Karsten Jurkchat’s Cannes Series

Alex Little and Karsten Jurkchat, senior creative team at Ogilvy Melbourne are in Cannes competing in the Cyber category of the Cannes Young Lions competition. Here, the pair shines a light on the Cannes celebrities you haven’t heard of, exclusively for CB.

“My air compressor for filling the scuba tanks is from a WW2 German U-boat. My grandfather stole it from a city called Toulon and brought it back to Cannes many years ago. They used it to compress the tubes that launch the torpedoes. I started on this scuba boat when I was 12 after watching many Jacques Cousteau documentaries. It was Cannes’ first diving centre, and now I own it. It is interesting because most people think the water is just blue and flat and salt. But with diving we show them that underwater there is life, and this helps them understand that when they throw a can or cigarette in the water, this life gets destroyed. It is more obvious with land. When you take someone to the forest, they see there are many things worth keeping safe. So, my main reason for diving is not money. It is to teach people there is something below the surface and that we must protect it for our children…okay maybe a little money.” – Fred Dessart, owner, Plongee Club de Cannes Diving Centre, Cannes

We found Fred during another surreal day in the south of France. Karsten and I, along with the 47 other Young Lions teams, met in the morning for the winners’ announcement of the 24-hour cyber competition. We’d only handed our entry in 12 hours earlier so the fact that they’d collated, processed and judged them all in that window, on top of herding 100-odd creatives to the other side of the world, is a massive feat of organisation. Long story short, the team from Britain took out the top honours. But we won new friends and a lifetime of stories. Not really, we hate every one of them.

The morning’s rejection was soon forgotten when that night we found ourselves being chauffeured 30 minutes out of Cannes to News Corp’s party held within the pristine grounds of a mountain chateau. News Corp are the Australian Young Lions sponsors and were generous enough to invite a couple of scruffy Aussies to their exclusive event, which boasted Ed Sheeran and Fatboy Slim. True story. I won’t go on about it, but safe to say the beautiful food, drinks and the snooker-sized cheese table all added up to a bloody good evening. Cheers to News Corp for the invite and backing the Young Lions competition year after year.