Cannes seminar highlight – Day Two

Paul Yole, Head of Strategy at The Brand Agency and a regular contributor during the Cannes week highlights the best seminar from each day of the Festival.

Picking the highlight today was difficult because there was not a lot of great stuff to choose from.

The Contagious session was good but you might expect that as they curate the coolest stuff from around the world and therefore had good content to start with. At least they had a clear theme – use your skills to do good – and they stuck to it.

My pick from today was the session hosted by Jeff Benjamin of JWT.

It started as badly as you might expect from one of those cosy couch chats but it was saved by three kids with an average age of 10.7 or thereabouts.

One was an 11 year old from Ireland who has just built an app for Band Aid, and the second was 9 year old Caine who was the feature of the You Tube hit Caine’s Arcade . What started as a little kid making a cardboard games arcade has turned into a real life entertainment experience and a charitable foundation that has already raised over $200,000.

The third was a precocious young lady who at age 12 became the youngest ever presenter at TED .

What made everyone sit up was the theme of thinking like a kid, or as they said “the wisdom of not knowing” (what could go wrong).

The great thing about kids is that they just go ahead and get things done, they are not afraid of failure and if they have a passion about something they follow it.

A lesson for us all there, I think.