CANNES DAILY DIARY: Day 2 with Gale Maimane

I’m a first timer, no team to disappear into, just me and thirteen wonderful other South African women here through the Open Chair, trying to drink this whole festival through a straw.

So here’s my honest answer to ‘how was Le Croisette?’: it was a lot. In the best way. Today was a good day. I learned my lesson on Day 1 and treated it as prep, not performance. Walked the Croisette, did the campus tour, scouted where things were on the map. That groundwork is the reason Day 2 landed the way it did.

Breakfast first, properly. Someone warned me the sessions would crack my mind open and they undersold it. By the time I got to the Palais I understood why – there is no catching up once you’re behind on food here. The day moves faster than your legs can carry you, and a missed meal becomes a 4pm crisis disguised as creative fatigue.

I’m staying centre-Cannes, close enough to walk everywhere, and I’ve learned fast that walking beats sitting in traffic that locals keep telling me is totally normale. The 2km bumper-to-bumper jams and the heaving pavements are apparently the festival’s once-a-year personality, not the everyday city. Hydration became its own full-time job by afternoon.

The real highlight of this day was our Open Chair session with Shelley Zalis of the Female Quotient through Open Chair. We got the opportunity to Listen to a woman who’s shaped this industry talk plainly about boundaries, creativity and intentionality, I kept thinking about how much of what wins here isn’t cleverness for its own sake, it’s ingenuity in service of something human. You can feel the industry’s mood shifting in real time, from ‘branded content’ to branded entertainment. The old line was always ‘if you’re going to interrupt someone’s entertainment, be entertaining.’ This week it feels less like an interruption problem and more we are finally accepting they have to earn the watch, the listen, the read.