I’m a great believer in strong agency brands. I also. believe we need a strong WPP brand to complement. and support them.. That’s why, for the first time, we decided to have a physical presence at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity – in the form of the WPP Beach. The idea was to demonstrate how much we value creativity and creative people, to provide a platform for our agencies and the work they do for our clients, and to present an open, confident, forward-looking WPP to the industry in which we play such a major part. During the week we introduced our Cannes Can: Diversity Collective scholars at an event with Gayle King from CBS. We hosted talks with, among many others, Unilever CEO Alan Jope, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Snap founder Evan Spiegel, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, MediaLink’s Michael Kassan, Kathleen Hall from Microsoft and Fox’s Lachlan Murdoch. We put on a fashion showcase with Tommy Adaptive, and had the Wendy’s twitter account (with a former stand-up comedian and now VMLY&R creative at the keyboard) slap down audience questions in the Palais des Festivals. We launched our single-use plastics initiative, and an unprecedented collaboration with agencies, media companies and platforms – the Global Alliance for Responsible Media – to address the problem of harmful content online. And we unveiled a new partnership – Project Listen – with iHeartMedia to help our clients capture the full value of the booming audio sector. By coming together as one company at Cannes we showed WPP for what it is: a powerhouse of creative talent and multi-discipline expertise. I’m sure this collective strength will drive further success in pitches, following our recent Instagram and L’Oréal wins. Finally – the WPP Beach was home to what Campaign called a "stunning installation" based on the new WPP logo. Colourful, multi-faceted and constantly in motion, the eight foot-high sculpture was also built to withstand winds of up to 100mph. As a metaphor for our company, that’s hard to beat. Mark 113