For an advertising awards festival that prides itself on recognizing the best of the best on a global scale, having Australian-born, London-based JWT worldwide CCO Craig Davis head up the Cannes Lions Film and Press juries makes perfect sense. His career has taken him to Singapore and Hong Kong while with Saatchi & Saatchi, and in 2003 he helped steer the agency to numerous 'Global Agency of the Year' accolades. As the first guest editor of The Gunn Report in 2007, and as a judge for pretty much every major award show on the circuit (including the Titanium category during Cannes Lions 2006), suffice to say his opinion carries much weight in the creative community. Before jetting off to Cannes to oversee the jury process ("Once I get there I won't see sunlight for 10 days," he laments), he took time to chat about the fest's international flavor and the value of a jury in touch with its emotions.

What do you hope to bring to the jury process this year, having sat on juries for all the major shows and helmed a couple?

I'm really going to encourage people to judge with their instincts and their emotions. There can be a herd mentality in this business, or waves of fashionability, and I don't think that serves anyone particularly well. So we've got a very strong and eminently qualified group of people on both the Film and Press juries, and I really want to encourage them to find the work which in their judgment is surprising, original and refreshing. With the other film content categories being in there for the first time, we're going to be looking for very good work and I think we're going to find it in some new and very exciting areas.

Yes, I was wondering how those new categories within Film will impact the roles of the jury and the jury president...

It's the way the world's going, and it's been that way for some time, but it's tricky for Cannes to keep up, because things develop very fast and Cannes is by its nature a retrospective. At a certain point it has to define categories and call for entries and have people send in work within those spaces. Come next year, those spaces will probably need to evolve [even further]. I think they've done a good job at trying to address it this year.

Do these new categories ramp up the amount of entries exponentially and make your jobs harder?

I don't know how much work will be in these spaces, but in many cases, they'll defy the time lengths of broadcast (laughs). A lot will be much longer than what we're used to seeing. But it's going to have to be good. Most people still snack on short form content - the reality is that most successful content on an environment like YouTube is still a couple of minutes long. There are people who've posted much longer content but the real test is quality over duration.

Let's go back to the idea of judging according to emotion. In your president's message you advise the jurors that if they see a piece of work and feel envy, they should award it a bronze; jealousy merits a silver, while humility should earn gold. Why does humility equal a gold Lion?