Conceived, cooked & published – all during dinner in Cannes

At Cannes Lions this week, we gathered for a dinner with Comscore titled Creative Alchemy: Where Art Meets Insight. And despite the name, there were no robes or bubbling cauldron – just great wine, fantastic people and a simple idea: creativity is the ability to turn a spark of inspiration into reality. That’s it. That’s the magic.

The format: one idea, many alchemists

The format was fairly simple, if slightly mad. Comscore invited a handful of us to dinner – not to stare at a slide deck, but to experience what happens when creativity, insight and technology come together over a few bottles of Italian red.

There was food from chef Bruno Sellier, wine expertly paired by David Rabaud, and a surprise live performance from Monsieur Orange, a Parisian street musician whose orange hat was only outdone by his charm. “There’s a structure beneath every song,” he said, “but the heart lives in the energy exchanged with the crowd.” Quite right.

There was also Elena Papernaya, an architect-turned-artist whose delicate abstract pieces captured fleeting moments of emotion. “You have to slow down to notice the small things,” she told me. “Like a child discovering the world for the first time.”

And, of course, there was me, scribbling away on my iPhone like some sort of digital alchemist, attempting to produce an article live, mid-dinner, with the help of a few AI tools (and a decent glass of Franciacorta).

Creativity is a team sport

It’s easy to forget that creativity isn’t the exclusive domain of people who wear ironic glasses and talk about ‘disruption.’ Jackelyn Keller, Comscore’s CMO, reminded us of that right at the start. “Only cultural intelligence is the fusion of data, measurement and insight,” she said – before admitting that sounds “a lot like jargon” and promptly scrapping the PowerPoint in favour of wine and live music. A woman after my own heart.

What Keller and her team did – alongside the brilliant and possibly mythical Frank Friedman, Comscore’s Data Alchemist (chief data and analytics officer) – was show us that structure, insight and rigor are creative acts, too. Friedman wasn’t there on the night, but his fingerprints were. “We don’t just polish data,” he once said. “We melt it down, reshape it, and extract insight like gold from ore.” Which, frankly, sounds more poetic than most agency manifestos.

AI helped, but it wasn’t the spark

Now, full disclosure: this article was generated live during the event using AI. That’s right – we turned wine, cheese and stray quotes into publishable prose faster than you could say pass the focaccia.

But here’s the thing: none of this would have happened if someone, somewhere, hadn’t had the idea to do it in the first place. AI is a powerful tool, sure. But it’s not the source of the spark. People are.

It’s the sommelier finding balance in a pairing. The artist who captures time in a brushstroke. The data scientist who sees patterns no one else can. The street performer who improvises a melody that makes a dinner party feel like a revolution.

Wartime, peacetime & alchemy

Cannes this year felt more “wartime CMO” than “peacetime strategist.” Everyone’s talking efficiency, ROI, smart allocation. Fair enough. But don’t lose sight of what got us here: that slightly irrational urge to make something from nothing. To turn a passing idea into a meal, a song, a campaign – or even a conversation worth remembering.

That’s the real creative alchemy. And it doesn’t live in a department. It lives in the people who act on their ideas.

So thank you to Jackelyn, Frank, Elena, Monsieur Orange, David – and all the creative alchemists hiding in plain sight.

Now, if someone could just fix the Wi-Fi…