Jury Insights – Interview with Toby Stüssi

The “Jury Insights” series continues with Toby Stüssi, Creative Producer, who joins this year’s Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards jury.

A Swiss journalist and media strategist with more than two decades of experience in television, Toby built the sports channel MySports from the ground up, shaping the editorial strategy behind Switzerland’s leading ice hockey coverage and producing the first club documentaries in Swiss television history. Today, he works as a creative producer across sport, documentary, and branded content.

In this conversation, Toby reflects on how judging has refined his own creative instincts and explores two defining themes emerging from this year’s entries: the courage to offer a distinctive perspective, and the importance of putting craft at the service of the story rather than using it as decoration.

“No one has ever been moved by an institution, only by someone inside it” – Toby Stüssi

Q: Can you tell us a little about your professional journey? What has been the most defining moment of your career so far?

My path did not begin in a newsroom. It began behind the counter of a bank. I trained in banking and spent my first years at UBS, safe by every sensible measure. But I wanted to tell stories, so I traded the safe thing for the uncertain one and studied journalism and talked my way into Swiss national television as a young sports journalist. Voicing my very first report felt less like a job than a threshold crossed.

The defining moment came years later, when I built the sports channel MySports from a green field. With no history to lean on, I made a bet that has guided me ever since: an audience does not tune in for the scores; it stays for the people. We produced the first club documentary in Swiss television history, then the next, and the next, treating athletes not as results but as heroes on a journey. An EBU Award for best European television format had already told me the craft could travel; the documentaries told me the audience was hungry for it. Everything since has been a variation on one conviction, put a human being at the centre and the numbers follow. Record reach and a doubled subscriber base turned out to be the by-product of a very old idea: the hero's journey.

Q: Has participating in the jury changed the way you view your own work or the industry?

Judging forces a rare kind of honesty, all the more so when you have spent years on the other side of the edit. When you watch film after film with the noise of your own habits switched off, you see how often craft is mistaken for storytelling, and how rarely budget correlates with emotion. It has made me more demanding of my own work. If a scene does not advance a character or raise a stake, it is decoration, and decoration is the quiet enemy of memory.

It has also renewed my optimism. Sitting with this year's documentaries, I was reminded that our field still produces work of real courage, films that trust the audience to feel before they are told what to feel. That trust is the whole game, and it is alive and well.

Q: What are your impressions of this year's entries? Are there any trends or approaches that have caught your attention?

What struck me most was a quiet shift from explanation to witness, and how sharply it divided the field. The strongest work placed a present, transparent guide beside me, someone who walked me through the story rather than narrating at me, and hooked me in the very first scene. The weakest retreated into the grammar of the long television report: informative, competent, and emotionally flat.

Two faultlines ran through everything I watched. The first was courage of perspective. The films that stayed with me were unafraid to show more than one side, while others stalled on a single, flattering surface and left the hardest questions unasked. The second was craft as storytelling rather than decoration. I saw brave choices in editing, in grading, and above all in music that was genuinely filmic instead of arbitrary, and I saw how often a great subject was undone by a score or a rhythm that simply did not serve it.

Q: In your view, what distinguishes a good entry from an award-winning one?

A good entry answers the brief. An award-winning entry outgrows it. Competence delivers a clean, correct film that you admire and then forget. What lifts a piece above that is a point of view, the unmistakable sense that a specific person made specific, brave choices about where to place the camera, when to stay silent, and whom to follow.

The winners share one quality: inevitability. It usually begins in the first scene, an opening so well chosen that you are inside the story before you have decided to be, and it is protected by discipline, the courage to cut, to stay compact, to keep the tension taut rather than let a strong subject sprawl. When the on-screen guide is present and honest, and every scene earns its place, you reach the end unable to imagine the story told any other way. That is not luck. It is structure.

Q: What does a corporate film need to have for it to stay in your mind long after the judging is over?

A face and a stake. Long after I have forgotten an organisation's message, I remember the person who was changed by it. The films that endure treat the brand as the setting and a human being as the plot, because no one has ever been moved by an institution, only by someone inside it or touched by it.

Then it comes down to the craft most viewers feel without naming: an opening scene that hooks in a heartbeat, a grade and a look that belong on a cinema screen rather than a newsroom monitor, music that is filmic instead of arbitrary, and the restraint to let a silence breathe. Memory does not archive information. It archives feeling, and feeling is engineered, frame by frame, by structure.

Q: If you could see one industry (e.g. Finance, Tech, Pharma) completely reinvent the way it tells its stories, which would it be, and why?

Pharma and healthcare, without hesitation, and I say it with affection. Few fields carry more genuinely human material, fear, hope, mortality, recovery, and few waste it more often. Too many times I watched a gripping subject trapped inside an old television grammar, told in a visual and dramatic language that felt a generation out of date, when the raw ingredients of the greatest stories ever told were sitting right there in the room.

The reinvention is easy to name and hard to do: let one patient become the hero of their own return to life, and let the science stand behind them rather than in front of them. Give that story a cinematic look, a filmic score, and the courage to slow down, and the entire genre changes overnight.

I know it is possible, because I spent years doing precisely this in another field. In sport, a world obsessed with the final score, I helped build documentaries that insisted on the human journey underneath it, and audiences who supposedly wanted only results stayed for the people. Healthcare holds richer material still. It simply needs the same nerve.

Q: As a jury member, what do you believe is the true value of awards, and why are platforms like the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards important for the industry?

The true value of an award is not the trophy. It is the standard the trophy defends. Awards draw a line in the sand and declare what excellence looks like this year, and in doing so they pull the whole field upward. They give the brave a reason to stay brave and the client a reason to say yes to the harder, better idea.

Platforms like the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards matter because they take our craft seriously as craft. They insist that a film made for a purpose can also be art, and that storytelling in the corporate and documentary world deserves the same rigour we grant to cinema. That insistence protects the very thing all of us are really here for: the story, and the person standing at the centre of it.