Eric Schmidt, Media Person of the Year at Cannes Lions 2011

Cristina Blanaru Creativity

Eric Schmidt will be awarded Media Person of the Year at Cannes Lions 2011, as a recognition for his influence in the development of today’s media landscape, ultimately playing an integral part in shaping the future of the creative communications industry.

Schmidt is Google’s Executive Chairman, who since joining Google in 2001, has helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley start-up to a global leader in technology.

Under Eric’s leadership, Google has truly changed the way people around the world access information on a daily basis

He has helped build Google in an astonishingly short period of time into one of the world’s biggest advertising media and one of the world’s most valuable brands. We are delighted to honour Eric with this award

Philip Thomas

Cannes Lions CEO

This award reflects the hard work of many people at Google working to develop new technologies to help advertisers thrive in the digital world

Eric Schmidt

From 2001-2011, Eric served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer, overseeing the company’s technical and business strategy alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation.

Prior to joining Google, he was the Chairman and CEO of Novell and Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems. Previously he served on the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bell Laboratories and Zilog.

He will be honoured during the Press, Cyber and Design Lions awards ceremony on the evening of Wednesday 22 June in the Palais des Festivals, Cannes (France).

Cannes Lions delegates will have the opportunity to attend the Google seminar on Wednesday 22 June at which Eric will be speaking.

Previous recipients of the Media Person of the Year Award include

  • Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook
  • Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation
  • Sir Anthony O’Reilly, CEO of Independent News & Media
  • Tsuneo Watanabe, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings
  • Sumner Redstone, Chairman and CEO of Viacom
  • Gerald Levin, CEO of AOL Time Warner.

58th Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity takes place from June 19th to June 25th 2011, in Cannes (France).