Cannes Diaries: Inside Outdoor jury room with Pallavi Chakravarti at Cannes Lions 2025

Cannes: If you’ve ever wondered exactly what happens inside a jury room, don’t. No two experiences are the same, so no one can really set the goings-on in stone. It’s like Heraclitus [a Greek philosopher who was clearly much wiser than I] once said - No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. This was my second time judging Outdoor Lions and it was a journey vastly different from the one before it. 

So, what then is that X factor that makes work tick? I’d say the jury composition is all-important when it comes to shaping outcomes. We are the sum total of our lived experiences and we carry that in with us. Our backgrounds, our geographies, our social, cultural and ethical beliefs, our political leanings and our core skill sets all contribute to how we see the work and critique it. But that being said, openness is the game changer. All the above factors that define our personalities can also be limitations if we are inflexible - after all, we are what we know but we are also limited by the extent of what we know. 

Within a few hours of mingling with my co-jurors, I realised that this group need not worry about rigidity - ours was a diverse mix, united in their ability to respect other points of view and change their own perspectives, if need be. We debated, we disagreed but we never got personal and it never got ugly. Which speaks volumes, given that the stakes are what they are. 

So, all the usual things happened. Sometimes, I wondered what an entry was doing on the shortlist. Hearing someone else in the room speak about why they loved it completely altered my read of it. There were cases when the timing of a piece wowed the room. When it was strikingly relevant, when it would not have worked in any other era but the one we are in now, everyone around the table just knew it. There was work that polarised us dramatically. There were campaigns that made me want to defend them like I had created them myself. There were ideas that we loved but were dropped out of consideration because the category they sat in was just not right. It was chaotic but there was method to it at the same time. But while this was all the same old same old and the process was as well-defined as always, the flavours of the work and the jurors blended to paint a picture that was unique to our room, our category and this moment in time alone. 

A jury room can be a brutal environment, where the smallest imperfection can become the largest nail in a campaign’s coffin. Equally, it can be a space that is generous and encouraging of pieces that aren’t flawless. Sometimes the head takes over, at other times the heart. Ideas die easily. They are brought back from the dead too, just as easily. A unanimous decision on a Grand Prix can take two minutes and an argument over a single shortlist can stretch for twenty-two. Craft is rewarded but so is strategy, and at what point one takes precedence over the other, is hard to pinpoint. Sleep is lost. Arguments are won and then lost and then won again. 

It’s tough to explain what goes on in there. But it was intense. So, like I said, if you’ve ever wondered exactly what happens inside a jury room, don’t. Because no one can really pin it down, not even the folks in there.