Come and meet UK advertising at Cannes!

UK advertising exports champion and co-founder of adam&eveDDB, James Murphy, looks forward to this year’s Cannes Lions and how attendees can meet UK advertising representatives. 

Cannes is a truly special event and it will be a pleasure form me to return once again, this time as UK Advertising Exports Champion, as well as founder of Cannes Lions Agency of The Year in 2018, adam&eveDDB. I’ll never forget collecting that particular award last summer and will be watching with interest who takes this year’s crown.

I’m hugely proud of the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading hubs for advertising and marketing services. It’s reflected in our performance year-after-year here in Cannes. Over the past 15 years, we have won more Lions than any other European country and more per capita than any other country in the world.

Meanwhile in the last ten years, our industry has seen consistent growth in advertising spend within the UK economy and over the same period we have nearly tripled the value we export to countries world-wide.

We do business with countries all over the world, from USA to China, from Australia to the UAE as well as across our fellow nations in Europe, leading with Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. We relish working on international briefs and producing creative work that travels worldwide to help businesses of all kinds grow – rising to creative challenges is in the DNA of our industry.

At the same time, we are delighted to be a destination point for global talent – in a recent survey by Credos, our advertising industry’s thinktank, 80% of our businesses employ non-British nationals. We are also a top exporter of advertising expertise around the world and this flow of talent in and out of our sector is particularly important to the UK as we look at our trading relationships with Europe and the rest of the world. We welcome ambitious creative talent to come and work in the UK during their career, just like we encourage our homegrown talent to go and work around the world to build their creative and strategic capabilities.

All of this means we can provide international businesses with an unrivalled concentration of expertise, creativity and knowhow, to produce the world’s most effective advertising work.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what makes the UK advertising industry so distinctive and its work so effective, come along during the festival and meet us. We’ll be in the Palais, outside the steps in our special Creativity Is GREAT hub and along the Croisette in spaces including Le Jardin de Clear Channel and the Little Black Book beach. Many of our representatives will be wearing Creativity Is GREAT pin badges. Everyone’s ready to meet, network and look at ways we can grow our businesses together around the world.