Kim Bartowski’s Cannes Diary #4

Kim Bartowski, creative director and associate partner at IBM iX is representing Australia on the Cannes Creative Data Lions jury. Bartowski, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors writes exclusively for CB.

Data is an ingredient of the idea, not the answer, meaning the creative idea should be more impactful because of the data. The data isn’t the hero, the creative idea should be. It’s the creative use and interpretation of that data makes the work stand out. Seems pretty clear to understand, right? So, you might have thought picking a Grand Prix was obvious after 10 people spent 24 hours over 4 days watching, discussing and debating the merits of each idea and the data that inspired it. After spending 960 hours together, you would have thought our jury’s favourite was obvious.

So not the case. In the Creative Data Lions we reviewed work for Data-enhanced Creativity, Data Storytelling, Data-driven Consumer Products, Real-time Data Targeting, Data Visualisation, Data-technology, Creative Data Collection and Research, Social Data and Insight, and Data Integration. How do you compare the merits of a project that invented a whole new technology with a campaign that used real-time data? This is a festival of Creativity and execution had to make the difference. We saw a number of campaigns that had similar problem statements that lead to similar executions and in narrowing our choices for a medal in one case, it came down to the pixel.

In the end, we chose a winner who will push us all to do better work tomorrow. They blended data, design, typography and storytelling into something elegant and simple. Our winner gave us all an immediate emotional reaction that bought some of us to tears, something you can only get from a piece of brilliant work.

Congratulations to our Grand Prix tonight.