As I head back to Cannes Lions this week, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing something unexpected.
Looking backwards.
I’ve revisited a decade of Shingerviews. Conversations with creative leaders, musicians, founders, marketers, comedians, technologists and dreamers.
At first, I thought I was simply archiving old interviews.
Instead, I found myself searching for patterns.
Not trends.
Not predictions.
People.
The strange thing about revisiting conversations that span ten years is realizing how much has changed and how little has changed.
Platforms came and went.
Technologies evolved.
Buzzwords arrived with great certainty and quietly disappeared.
Yet the people whose ideas still resonate today shared remarkably similar qualities.
They were curious.
They were generous.
They were restless.
They remained students even after becoming teachers.
Recently, someone told me my writing feels too reflective.
Maybe they’re right.
Maybe all of us are wrestling with a new tension.
As AI becomes better at producing answers, our job becomes producing something else.
Perspective.
Taste.
Experience.
Contradiction.
The messy human stuff.
The things that don’t arrive fully formed from a prompt.
Reviewing these conversations reminded me that the most valuable thing any of us bring isn’t information.
It’s interpretation.
It’s why two people can witness the same moment and tell completely different stories.
One of the gifts of Cannes has always been that beneath all the noise, all the announcements and all the hype, you find people sharing perspectives.
Not answers.
Perspectives.
And that’s what I’m looking forward to most this year.
Not the stages.
Not the campaigns.
Not even the technology.
The conversations.
Because in a world increasingly filled with generated content, human context may become our most valuable creative asset.
If you’re in Cannes, see you in the sun.
If you’re elsewhere, see you in the stories.
Either way, here’s the soundtrack.
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