The AP team covering the Cannes Film Festival dramatically improved the number of page views and customer downloads with smart use of technology and unique coverage.
The Cannes Film Festival is a glamorous event held in the south of France that doesn’t always resonate with a U.S. audience. This year, working with a small team, the AP landed strong interviews in all formats, took advantage of a perfectly located office for some unique visuals and used new technology to improve speed for wins with customers.
Led by International Entertainment Video Editor Louise Dixon, Film Writer Jake Coyle, International Photo Editor Dejan Jankovic and Entertainment Photo Director Ali Kaufman, the AP produced 127 newsroom-ready and 23 consumer-ready packages and put out eight livestreams over the two-week festival.
Consumer-ready output nearly doubled from 2022. The top six newsroom-ready packages had 100-plus downloads, and three of the top 20 performing videos were shot from the AP office balcony position — offering a perspective of the carpet with views of stars emerging from cars and signing autographs for fans. This spot was useful because lives were banned on the carpet.
The team experimented with fast filing the arrivals of the big stars as soon as the carpets ended and the embargo lifted, increasing our speed. They also fast filed the arrivals at press conferences to provide the earliest images possible of the A-list names.
Coyle scored the only news agency interview with Johnny Depp and one of the first interviews with Wes Anderson — both in video and text. The two Depp stories had nearly 400,000 page views on AP digital platforms. Overall, 32 text stories received more than 924,000 page views so far, an increase of 166% over last year’s festival.
All five Cannes photo galleries had more page views combined than the other 19 photo galleries produced by the AP in the same period.
Adam Egan, Sian Watson, Martina Inchingolo, Steve Pollock and cameraperson Florent Bajrami Watson made up the video team. Watson and Inchingolo primarily produced, and Pollock and Egan did hybrid shooting. The photo team was Daniel Cole, Joel C. Ryan, Vianney Le Caer, Scott Garfitt and freelance photo editor Millie Turner. The team sent more than 11,300 images, with Jankovic, Kaufman and Turner sending roughly 6,500 of those in real time.
For their tireless and creative effort, the AP Cannes team wins Best of the Week — Second Winner honors.
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