We all have a responsibility
“Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.”
- Louis L’Amour
One of the things we always strive for at The Pop Up Agency is to develop and learn — as a company and as individuals. The key to that is sharing of knowledge. Sharing what we know and listening to and implementing what other people know.
Some of our methods for maintaining a constant flow of knowledge are:
Having mentors and mentoring others.
Speaking at and attending events and festivals.
Work with creative schools around the world through lecturing, facilitating and consulting.
The ladder has proved to be an incredible source of knowledge and inspiration. We truly appreciate being able to support and empower young minds and what we get in return is something you cannot put a price on. Through this work, we sit front row with the future, the generation brands and businesses are spending billions trying to figure out. We learn how they think, how they work and what they want. And trust us, they know what they want.
A couple of weeks ago, for the 3rd year in a row, we were invited back to Cannes Lions. For the past two years we’ve been speaking and running workshops but this year, we were also invited to run one of their Cannes Academies. The Roger Hatchuel Academy is a one-wheel creative program for 31 students in the age between 19–23 years old and representing 26 different nationalities. With no concern of ROI in terms of time spent etc, we said yes. Because we knew that the value of having such a diverse group of young creatives in one room wasn’t something you could calculate on. Much like diversity in general.
On Sunday, June 18th, we met the students for the first time before properly kicking off Monday. It was that first day of school feeling with emotions of excitement and nervousness running high. We started off with a classic: everyone presenting themselves, where they’re from and what they aspired to. The biggest learning here was that everyone was extremely proud to represent their countries. In fact, throughout the week, sharing knowledge of culture was as high on the agenda as sharing knowledge about the creative industry. Another manifest that who we are, is as important as what we do. And to this generation, in particular, there seems to be a fantastic need to embrace individualism. It is a generation where mixed raced children are the fastest growing demographic and perhaps the importance of owning and embracing culture has something to do with that. Regardless, it is so vividly clear that the openness and values they expect from each other, they expect from their future places of work.
Although we belong to a different generation, we share all the thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs of those 31 students. And therefore, we had created a program giving a wide perspective of the creative industry. Basically, we tried to create something as close to the perfect world as possible: 50/50 gender ratio, different industry level speakers, varying topics, diversity in terms of color, disabilities etc. And trust us when we say that making this come together wasn’t an easy job — for the Cannes Lions organization, for us or for anyone else involved. It took hard work, coordination, and cooperation between central and local stakeholders to gather such a global group. And we think that’s a pretty solid reflection of reality. There’s no doubt that striving for a company and culture with more diversity is harder work than status quo.
But it has to be done — and we all have a responsibility in making it happen. Our industry claims to value diversity and diverse thinking — now it is time to actually reflect it.
