Young Lions: a live masterclass on creative craft

Young Lions is the Olympics of creativity — seven competitions, 24 to 48 hours each, run across 65+ countries as part of the Cannes Lions circuit. TMA ran a live masterclass for competitors heading into this year's brief, and the advice held up well beyond the competition itself: it's a compressed version of how any good creative idea actually gets made under pressure.

If you don't win, you learn — but only if you use the clock right

The realistic shape of a 24-hour brief: roughly 10% of the time on research (brainstorming ideas separately, before groupthink sets in), 40% on ideation (building on ideas together, narrowing to three favorites, then developing on top of those three), 40% on craft (designing the board, writing the submission), and a final 10% on collaboration and submission.

The advice that sits between the ideation and craft phases is the one teams skip under pressure and regret: choose the idea, then sleep on it. Committing early — and resisting the urge to keep chasing new directions once the clock is half gone — is what separates finished, sharp submissions from crowded, unfinished ones.

The three-question test for whether an idea is good enough to submit

Unexpected — is this audacious, has it been done before, and is it something you'd actually tell a friend about?

Feasible — does it use existing digital platforms, partnerships or media properties in a genuinely unique way, and could a real client afford to execute it on the budget given?

Simple — can the idea be explained in one sentence, and does that sentence actually answer the brief? If it takes a paragraph to explain, it's not ready yet.

Advice from the room

On resilience after rejection: build what one judge called a "positivity bank account" — a dedicated folder of positive feedback and correspondence to revisit specifically when a pitch or entry doesn't land. Confidence compounds the same way self-doubt does; it just needs somewhere to live.

On whether the written submission or the creative execution matters more: they're not actually separate disciplines. They're "one and the same" — two different ways of articulating the same core idea, and a weak version of either one is usually a sign the underlying idea isn't sharp enough yet.