No, Donald Trump didn’t get hit by a stray meteorite (nice as that would be).
Better than that.

Little ol’ Oirland beat the might Italy – and made it through to the next round of Euro 2016!

Where they face France, so that’ll probably be the end of it.
But hey, we’ll take what we can get!

This world-changing event was watched by yours truly in an Irish pub with a gang of wonderful Irish reprobates from Havas Dublin.
So you’ll be unsurprised to know that the green-ness I felt upon waking up this morning was not all Irish pride.

But the show goes on, and so I manned up, drank a boatload of coffee and set off for the Palais.

First up was a conversation between Kevin Plank, the CEO and founder of Underarmour, and David Droga (if you have to ask who he is, you’re in the wrong industry).

It’s a remarkable story, the Underarmour tale – from two guys in a basement to the 4th biggest sports apparel brand in the US. So it was fantastic to hear it told by the man who lived it, and inspiring to see the closeness between him and Drogo and the inherent trust that he has in Droga 5. Which of course had to be earned, but is now that thing we often speak of but seldom truly see – a real partnership between client and agency.

Then on to another perennial overachiever – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, director of (like you don’t know) The Revenant, Birdman, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, among many. Some love him, some think he’s an over-indulgent egomaniac, but no-one denies he’s a one-off and every film he makes is smart, original and beautifully crafted.

Speaking of craft, another highlight of the day was P&G CMO Marc Prichard, who posed the question – are we making “craft or crap”?
(His words, not mine).

It’s his belief that an overwhelming amount of what we now call “content” is simply self-indulgent crap, and the reason that when P&G get it right, they get it right with a vengeance (think Old Spice, Proud Sponsor Of Mothers, Pooface – the list goes on) is that their agencies value the craft of emotional resonance and beautifully crafted storytelling above all else. I don’t disagree. Earlier Droga had said that there’s nothing more powerful than a brand with a point of view, and Pritchard in his own way echoed that sentiment. As Public Enemy famously rapped, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. Hear hear.