Matt Gill’s Cannes Diary: Day Three

Matt Gill, group CD, Healthy Thinking Group is Australia’s representative on the Health & Wellness Lions jury. Gill, along with most of the Australian and NZ jurors, is reporting exclusively for CB.

I was so tired at the end of yesterday’s session I skipped dinner and headed to bed. Trouble was this morning I woke at 4am wide awake. I wandered around the town again as it seems its the only time at the moment I can take in the sights. Had breakfast then back to the jury room for an agreed early start. We had to make it through 350 case studies today no matter what as shortlisting starts tomorrow. We knocked it over in a reasonable 11 hours and actually got out in daylight. It was raining all day so I suppose we didn’t miss much!

Again today we saw lots of good work, the Brazilians as usual doing some interesting stuff and I think Australia and New Zealand will be in the running too. Wearable Tech kept rearing it’s head again and there was a lot of talk today about the gap users are finding between devices and the companion apps. The app experience generally hasn’t been great so far in our market. However I think interpretation of the data seems to be more meaningful and I think we’ve gone a long way in the last 12 months. One that stood out to me was in the animal health section which was almost like a Fitbit for dogs but worn as a collar. The data collected lets you know how much exercise that dog had had and then feed it the appropriate amount of food and also pass on information to your vet. There are also collars that track your pets mood for canine depression, believe it or not a large number of our pets are depressed.

There was also discussion around what we’ll start to see with this technology that is more sophisticated than a simple connected scale. Soon we’ll see items like ECG devices that can monitor a patient via bluetooth and forward it to their doctor.

There were heaps of campaigns around blood donation, breast cancer and organ donation today, I’d say about 10 in each section, most of which were interesting in well trodden categories where it’s hard to do something fresh and also make an impact. So we’ll have to dig deep there and make sure we make the right calls when we’re dealing with very emotive subjects.

A few of our jury went to Astoux et Brun for dinner but we were fairly sensible as we’ve got a huge day tomorrow. I was looking forward to seeing a lot of football here but so far not caught anything. England vs Wales tomorrow but I know where I’ll be, in that room again! France won tonight and horns are beeping and want stop anytime soon.

bonne nuit