Hear from Marketing Grads, Hari & Liam, on their Cannes Young Lions shortlist

16 May 2023 Europe and TurkeyIrelandEarly careersMarketingGraduates
Hari and Liam

Liam and Hari are both on the second year of the Diageo Marketing Graduate Scheme. Having recently entered and been shortlisted for the Cannes Young Lions competition, we asked them to tell us about their experience.

Having joined Diageo in September 2021, we both work as Assistant Brand Managers on the Guinness brand team. Our areas of work are quite different as during our time on the programme we’ve both discovered and developed our own strengths. Liam leads all things social media, while I, Hari, primarily work on the culture, entertainment & experiential space.

Cannes Young Lions is a competition that falls under the umbrella of and is run by the Cannes Lions Festival, the most prestigious festival of creativity in the world. It provides the opportunity for young creatives under the age of 30 to demonstrate their skills by answering a challenging brief under intense pressure.

We had lots of support from Diageo, even before we started the competition! Entering Cannes Young Lions was identified as a great opportunity for us to develop as marketeers, and we were asked by the Marketing Leadership Team to represent Diageo at the competition.

So many of colleagues were really interested in our participation to the competition, offering so much support - even jumping onto a Zoom call over the weekend to hear our pitch!

This year, over 200 young professionals took part in the Cannes Young Lions competition in Ireland. We were given a corporate social responsibility brief from a charity, selected by the national facilitators of the competition - the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland. In the brief, we were tasked to create a value-adding partnership between our brand and the charity and present a response within 48 hours! From all the teams that entered across categories, a select few including ourselves were then shortlisted and given the chance to pitch their proposal to a panel of industry experts, as well as representatives from the selected charity.

Overall, the whole experience was really exciting! There aren’t a lot of situations where marketers need to think or act in the ways which were encouraged for the competition. We were asked to put the executional details to one side, which we often focus on in real world situations, and purely approach the brief with a creative mindset. That really opened the creative side of our brains and allowed us to think in a different way to help solve the problem we needed to tackle.

This experience has for us cemented the fact that Diageo is a great place to start your marketing career as a graduate! From incredible brands to exciting projects, every day is a new but exciting challenge. Our advice for anyone looking to apply to any of the grad programmes would be talk about your passions and be confident in carving your own path in your role. When you join, the culture of the organisation is extremely supportive, and colleagues will always be happy to help – so don’t be afraid to ask for help and feedback, and constantly look for new opportunities to better yourself.

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