Google’s Eric Schmidt named Cannes Lions 2011 Media Person of the Year

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity has named Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt as the Media Person of the Year. Each year, the Festival presents award to a prominent personality who is 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.

“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,” said Philip Thomas, chief executive officer, Cannes Lions.

“This award reflects the hard work of many people at Google working to develop new technologies to help advertisers thrive in the digital world,” added Schmidt.
He will be honoured during the Press, Cyber and Design Lions awards ceremony on the evening of June 22 in the Palais des Festivals, Cannes, France.
From 2001-2011, Schmidt served as Google’s chief executive officer, overseeing the company’s technical and business strategy alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Prior to joining Google, he was the chairman and chief executive officer 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 holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.