Meet the Students Hacking the Cannes Apartment Economy

If you’re a hungry young creative keen to get in front of the world’s top talent scouts and creative directors, Cannes is naturally a good place to be. It also happens to be pretty hard to catch people’s attention, amid the parties, seminars and, let’s face it, rosé.

So two creative communication students at the Danish School of Media and Journalism have come up with an ingenious hack to leverage the Cannes accommodation scrum and get some interviews. Christian Skjøtt (23) and Alexander Keblow Kofoed (26) figured out they should place themselves on the platform that would be a perfect honeytrap for creative agencies scrabbling for last minute accommodation – Airbnb. They’ve created a fake Cannes apartment listing and filled the images with snippets of their work.

“We definitely had in mind to do something related to the Cannes Lions Festival. We know it’s a hot spot for the top creatives in the advertising industry. We wanted to create something that would make creative directors remember us and not just hope to get attention through a boring email,” they explain.

It’s a smart idea, borne from necessity. “We actually had different platforms in mind – one of our initial ideas was to actually transform a hotel room (with permission of course) but that would be too narrow so we came up with the idea of using Airbnb – that way the listing itself would feature some of our work and would be viewed by a broader audience.”

Cannes Lions has become something of a tradition for students at Christian and Alexander’s school – there’s a tradition of the whole class saving up and heading to the south of France in their second year.

And this smart bit of platform hacking seems to be working – so far the pair have booked interviews with Grey New York, 4creative London and Ogilvy India.

View The Portfolio Apartment's listing here.