Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Uncensored Renegades. This is a new show that I'm launching with Kory Marchisotto and we're going to be focusing in on leadership and we're going to be doing that in a new format which is the two of us tackling one topic for 20 minutes. So shorter than normal show but super focused and with the absolute rockstar that is Kory. I know you're going to love this. Now, if you want to make sure you get this every single week, please do go and subscribe to Uncensored Renegades in your feed and then you'll never ever miss an episode again. But without further ado, let's get into it. Here it is.
All right, K boss. So, last time we attempted to do an episode in 15 minutes. It didn't go too well.
We were close. Now, I thought it'd be fun because we are together in Cannes to talk about what does it take to win a Lion and what's the process like as well because I think people be really fascinated to know and because you're here and you're up for not one but two really big awards and actually for anyone listening and watching we are actually literally you sat here waiting waiting for the phone to go to find out whether you've won. I literally had a dream last night. Woke up in the middle of the night that all my teeth fell out of my mouth. And my team analyzed that this morning and they said it's stress and anxiety and I said, 'No shit.' Waiting for this to see whether or not we won the Titanium or the Glass. That would explain why the teeth are falling out of my mouth in the middle of the night.
Well, the first thing I would say about the Cannes festival for those who have not been here is it's a lesson in endurance. It's about a year's worth of activity in one week. And we are here on the last day of the festival. And as I look in the rearview mirror, I can't even believe the amount of things that happen in one week. And as it relates to specifically the Titanium and the Glass, which are the highest that there is. I actually didn't know until we were shortlisted for them that it is a live presentation in front of a jury.
I didn't know this either. I thought the jury decide and then it gets announced. But so you've actually got to pitch your own Lion.
You have to pitch your own Lion. So this year there was over 30,000 submissions in total for all the submissions that came in to win any Lion. And there's a gazillion different categories. If you get shortlisted for any other Lion, it goes through a regular process and you just get alerted you've won a bronze, a silver, or a gold. In the case of Titanium and Glass, basically your first pitch buys you your second pitch, which is here physically in front of a jury. And of course, if you've never done this before, which I never did and I had no idea, you ask a lot of questions. So, we got the phone call a week before we got here. Now, you have to clear your calendar because you've got to figure out, I've got to bring a new pitch with new information. I need to understand what am I up against? Who are the judges? What matters to them? What's the actual rigor and discipline of the process in and of itself? So, it's actually a lot of work. And when you're an underdog like ELF is and like our agency Oberland, you don't have a staff of people whose job it is to do this. So, we actually have to stop what we're doing and pivot to do this because now you've got five days to get a new pitch done to get in front of the jury.
I don't think many people realize it because I was a bit shocked to discover that a lot of the most successful Cannes Lion winners, they do have dedicated teams doing the research, doing the pitches, you know, basically managing the whole process, making sure that they're on time. Like, you do have a job to do at the same time, right? I mean you are running a billion dollar business. I have you are doing real job. I do real work as well. This is not a normal experience for you. What was the what's the actual pitch like? I mean who's in the jury? But by the way, can you go and sit in as a member of the public and listen?
Actually I also learned that along the process. So the first thing is understanding the constraint of time, right? This is the most important thing. So they give you 22 minutes on the clock and it's very prescriptive and it's very rigorous. There is no veering off schedule. The first two minutes is your case video. All of us have produced a two-minute video which goes in as part of your submission. And I think that's really just to jog the juror's mind because they've seen so many submissions. You're now down to the short list. In the case of Titanium, that's 17 new case files that you have to review. So the two-minute video basically jogs your memory. I think Glass is more like 25 or 26 shortlisted. So that's your first two minutes. The next 10 minutes is your live presentation. And they will cut you off and they cut us off both times. So that's why I know that. And then you have 10 minutes Q&A. So for Glass and Titanium, two completely different rooms, spirits, energies, jurors. So you do know who the jurors are. And they do allow it to be open to the public. So people, as long as there's capacity in the room, people can come in and watch. So you're not only in front of the front row of jurors, you're also in front of an audience. So our first at-bat was 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday morning. We come in bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. We've obviously rehearsed the night before. We've got our whole spiel down to 10 minutes and it took us a while to get there and we asked if we needed to introduce ourselves because that takes time. And they said, 'No, somebody's going to introduce you. Don't worry about that. You don't need it.' Okay, great. So, we're standing on the side of the room waiting to be introduced. And this particular room for Glass was like a classroom. So, you've got a big projector and screen at the front of the room and then classroom style. So we're standing on the side of the room and they call us up and the woman announcing goes, 'So I'd like to welcome Gabrielle to the stage.'
And I'm like, 'So now I just...'
You're in the wrong room.
Exactly. I literally blacked out. I completely blacked out. I'm like, 'Who's Gabrielle? Am I in the wrong room? Is this the wrong time?' Literally blacked out. And I'm like completely disoriented. And I know that I have to be very rigorous and disciplined. And I'm in a state of disorientation. So now I'm like, do we go up? Do we not go up? Who the hell is Gabrielle? Is Gabrielle coming? Is Gabrielle gonna introduce me? I don't know what's happening. So now I realize like the clock's ticking and I'm not even at the front of the room yet. So me and Lisa, who's at our Oberland agency, we get up to the front of the room. Now we have to introduce ourselves. And we didn't get any time back. So we like that whole disoriented moment, then coming up there, introducing ourselves, playing the video. Now I'm short at least 2 minutes. So we did our presentation. Obviously we lost time so they cut us off and we lost about two minutes on the tail end and then we went straight into Q&A. And I do have to really appreciate one of the judges who asked it was probably the third question in the Q&A who said, 'Kory, I'd love to pose a question to you. Was there anything that you didn't present in that deck that we should know about?'
That's good. And I really appreciated that because it told me that they saw what happened and while they couldn't give us time back, they were going to use this time to give us the opportunity to say anything we may have missed that we thought was critical to the file.
Might be a random thought. Have you heard of the Pratfall effect?
