By Adam Wakefield

Luckin’s appointment as the Jury President of the Print and Publishing Jury at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity follows three separate stints as a judge at the festival. For Luckin, it is a recognition of her experience within the industry and her previous stints as a Cannes judge, but also the festival’s drive for increased diversity on their panels.

“The Jury Presidents are around 50% women this year. It’s been a conscious effort of the Cannes organisers to include more women and people of colour, because those viewpoints are interesting. They stimulate debate because you have people with different perspectives around the table”, Luckin says.

Gender and advertising

That drive by Cannes organisers is reflective of the still lopsided gender dynamic within advertising. According to The 3% Conference, while women make up over 45% of those working within the advertising industry in the United States, only 11% are creative directors.

Luckin believes South Africa is “actually slightly ahead of the curve. Women are better represented in South African agencies than internationally. I know of very strong female creative leaders in this country, such as Vanessa Pearson, Bridget Johnson, Suhana Gordhan, and Maraiana O’Kelly”.

“I think this country has a number of great creative female leaders. I’ve been lucky enough. When I was at TBWA, the creative directors I worked with were about 50% female and the board was also about half female. It was the same at Ogilvy,” Luckin says.

It’s when Luckin goes overseas to international creative directors’ conferences she finds herself as the only woman, or one of two, in a room of 20.

One aspect of advertising Luckin has observed is the lack of black women in creative leadership positions or founding their own agencies locally, compared to the increasing number of black men and white women in similar positions.

“I want to find out to try and help. It isn’t because there isn’t good black female talent. I’ve worked with some brilliant young, black women,” Luckin says.

“One of the things I want to do is to help incubate a black female agency.”

African advertising and Western vanilla

For Luckin, beyond diversity adding different perspectives to a judging panel, South Africa’s own local context has generated resourcefulness and ingenuity, two wells local agencies draw on as they punch above their weight in the international advertising arena.

From her observation, Luckin wished marketers and brands elsewhere in Africa allowed the creatives they work with to exercise the ingenuity and creativity that they’re capable of.

“People from different backgrounds bring different stories, amazing stories, to the table, and new ones. The other is the kind of problems we have to solve. It can lead to great ingenuity,” Luckin explains.

“You get some very, very interesting work coming out of places like Egypt, Philippines, Tunisia, Bangladesh, places where they’ve had to solve a problem without many resources.”

An example would be a campaign in Egypt, where Vodaphone developed micro-recharge cards (airtime) equalling cents so café owners, who notoriously struggled to have adequate short change on hand, could give that to their customers instead of sweets, as had been the custom.

“That is an idea that comes straight out of context. If you look at the ingenuity on the African continent in the tech world, investors, start-ups, there is a lot happening here,” Luckin says.

“I’m not sure whether that ingenuity is encouraged in the communications field. If I look at advertising on the African continent, it is a terribly vanilla version of Western advertising. The same old tropes about success, being attractive.”

South America is another example of how local context can produce great advertising. Luckin cites the likes of Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile as countries that produce thought provoking advertising.

“Creative people across the continent need to tell stories their way because a lot of the accepted wisdom about marketing comes from the West and it gets transplanted into Africa,” Luckin says.

Each generation is different, and the same

Luckin jokes that her career in advertising is older than the Internet itself, having entered the industry in 1994 as a copywriter. Today, those that Luckin manages have grown up with the Internet, but the challenges of getting the best of her team veer away from the tropes of millennials’ supposed lack of work ethic.

“The challenges are not what one might think. Growing up as a digital native doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand how Google Analytics works or how SEO works. Young creatives now are very social media savvy. They have a social media presence,” Luckin says.

“That was the interesting thing for me. I ‘grew up’ as a copywriter. There was no Internet when I started in advertising and it sort of only started filtering through in 98’ I guess.”

Luckin made it her mission to adapt to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat as they launched but it was only when she started working in a digital agency that Luckin began to understand the granular workings of social media. The staff under her know how to use social media, which is very different from understanding how it works, and which advertising works for each platform.

What Luckin does enjoy when working with younger people is the freshness of their view point, which is “very cool”.

“Everyone goes on about millennials and their work ethic, but I don’t know. I’ve gone through generations of young creatives and it’s always kind of the same,” Luckin says.

“If they are passionate about what they do, they will work hard for you. I find a lot of the young creatives have a side gig, and that’s quite a thing because that’s often where you lose them, when they pursue that passion full time. I love that. Young people coming into advertising have portfolio lives. They have other passions.”

What Luckin brings to the mix is the maturity, calmness and experience she has earned over a 23-year-career in the industry. If something goes wrong, Luckin’s been-there-done-that, and can provide perspective.

“It’s not the end of the world if the client bombed your campaign after it was shot. It’s happened to me before. You’re going to be fine,” she says.

What keeps Luckin coming back for more

Luckin may have been in the industry for some time, but her curiosity is what keeps her coming back for more. Asked why she enjoys what she does, Luckin says in advertising you get exposure to a “huge number of different industries”.

“I’ll be working on banking or finance today, tomorrow I will be working with a packaging client, and you get an insight into the industry, their difficulties, things that you never thought about in their universe,” Luckin says.

“It’s fascinating. I like that variation. The other thing I like is working with young creatives, nurturing them, mentoring them, teaching them. That’s really rewarding. When you sit and look at an idea and you’re thinking it through and you’re building on it. That is really rewarding.”

For more information, connect with Luckin on Twitter.

To find out more about Luckin's appointment as a Jury President, read our story, Fran Luckin appointed as Jury President at Cannes Lions.