Eric Schmidt named Cannes Lions Media Person of the Year
Google’s executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt is to receive The Media Person of the Year Award at next month’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, it has been revealed today.
Each year, the festival presents the award to a prominent personality who is seen as an influential figure in the development of today’s media landscape, ultimately playing an integral part in shaping the future of the creative communications industry.
Previous recipients include Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook; Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation; Tony 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 and Gerald Levin, CEO of AOL Time Warner.
The organisers of the festival said that since joining Google in 2001, Schmidt 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,” said Philip Thomas, Cannes Lions CEO. “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.”
Schmidt said the award reflects the hard work of many people at Google working to develop new technologies to help advertisers thrive in the digital world.
Schmidt served as Google’s CEO from 2002 until stepping down in January of this year. Before joining Google, he was the chairman and CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Previously he served on the research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bell Laboratories and Zilog. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master’s degree and PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
He is a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council in the UK. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a fellow in 2007. He also chairs the board of the New America Foundation, and since 2008 has been a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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.