Digiday covers the latest from marketing and media at the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. More from the series →It all started with a single slide. Sport Beach kicked off as Stagwell’s beachside activation at the 2023 Cannes Lions festival but has since grown into a standalone business unit in the challenger holding company as its popularity at Cannes Lions surged each year.
Beth Sidhu, CEO of Sport Beach, and one of its earliest architects, recalled in an interview with Digiday that the idea of Sport Beach originated from a slide sent to her in the summer of 2022 by Evin Shutt, the Stagwell agency 72andSunny’s longtime CEO and partner, outlining a concept the agency’s founder Glenn Cole and chief growth officer Damaune Journey had worked up.
“Regan [Considine, Stagwell’s vp of brand] and I then spent all of the fall of 2022 turning it from one slide into a real idea, and getting the buy-in from the CEOs at Stagwell, and getting support and buy-in from [holdco CEO] Mark Penn, and, of course getting our Lions friends on board as well.”
Convincing various other stakeholders wasn’t the easiest job, Sidhu acknowledged. “Many people had raised eyebrows about the idea of Sport Beach from the start … There was a lot of skepticism, and a lot of me running around promising people it wasn’t going to be Fyre Festival 2.0.”
