Thirty-seven hours of travel, four hours of sleep, and one deeply offended shoulder later, I made it up the hill to my Airbnb. I reassured myself I would be fine. Bright. Awake. Entirely capable of a full day of talks.

That, I suppose, is the entry requirement. A certain, slightly delusional optimism.

Because Cannes, even on day one, asks quite a lot of it. You arrive mildly delirious, a little disoriented, and immediately surrounded by people who seem to have slept, stretched, and secured three brand deals before breakfast.

You are here to meet people, talk about work, and keep up. Preferably all at once.

This is a festival for optimists.

I’m here as part of the Creative Academy 30 Under 30, a global cohort of young creatives who are, for lack of a better phrase, alarmingly switched on. It is the sort of room that improves your posture and your thinking at the same time.

Jaime Robinson opened with a talk on resilience, very much in the spirit of Chumbawamba. You get knocked down, you get back up again. Simple in theory, less so in practice. But it sets the tone. You are here to try, fail, recalibrate, and have another go.

An earlier Omnicom session offered a different kind of clarity. The CEO as a walking campaign. Not messaging, but decisions. Brands are shaped less by what they say, and more by what they consistently do. Sensible, and slightly sobering.

Then came 'Pimp My Portfolio' with Camilla Cappina from McCann New York. Direct, unsentimental, and exactly what was needed. Make the work clear. Make it easy to understand. Make it impossible to scroll past. Romance, it turns out, is nothing without function.

And then, inevitably, AI.

Michael Barrett, co-founder of Supergood, framed it as a creative reckoning. The tools will change. The output will multiply. But taste, judgment, and originality remain stubbornly human. He quoted Werner Herzog. Do not look away.

Which feels like the right instinct. The people who stay curious, who engage rather than retreat, are the ones who shape what this becomes.

At the Meta Beach, Rob Reilly of WPP echoed the same idea. AI will give us volume. Quality is still our problem to solve. 
By the end of the day, you are carrying quite a lot. Fragments of conversations. Half-formed ideas. Standards that feel just a little higher than they did yesterday.

Off to a happy hour now. Research purposes, obviously.

More soon.

The author is designer, Lopez Design.