Gems of Insight from D&AD’s 2024 Jury Rooms

Craft in itself, when it's done well, rises to the top. Trends come and go, but I think that the love of craft and the visionary nature of something like art direction and the originality that it can bring – that is always something that makes the difference. You can see it in some of the work. 

Like any of the shows, you get work that you go through at the beginning and you're like, 'there's nothing here' because everything feels like a sea of sameness. Eventually, once you've sifted through everything, there'll be a couple of pieces, sometimes one or two, that really stand out for you above the rest. It's always an interesting experience. And I think that originality plays such a big part of it. It just shows you how difficult that is to do – to sell to clients and fundamentally follow through with in the end, because there's always death by a thousand cuts when you're executing an idea from in your headspace to having it live out there in the world. 

Art direction fundamentally has to be idea-led. You are trying to communicate something visually, and therefore, you can't write your way out of the problem. You need to visualise your way out. That is a craft. You cannot remove the idea from craft in art direction. That's impossible. You can have great sound, you can have a great track, it can be beautifully illustrated, but I think art direction fundamentally has to have an idea attached to it beyond beauty.

We had a great jury – I think that everyone was pretty visually led. Often you have quite similar personalities, yet you all come from different places and have different perspectives. So, like any jury room, it was always interesting, but I think that everyone had a love for art direction. That is obviously super important. 

It's always fantastic to be able to have your mind changed by someone else's perspective, because it shows you how important it is to have a diverse set of brains thinking about something. I always find it interesting and I thought that we had a really fruitful discussion throughout the two days where everyone was giving their opinions and sometimes changing people's minds. That discussion is so important as a jury, because otherwise it can be just one person's view of what's great. I think the most important thing in a jury is to be able to not just have one person to have a loud point of view, because otherwise it's gonna just be a jury of one. 

One specific piece that I loved and swayed the whole room was 'My Japan Railway'. Created for the 150 year anniversary of Japan Railway, it solves a business problem and brief visually, with beauty and expression that has charm and a sense of fun to it across every single channel. It really takes you on that visual journey and gets you excited about the amount of stations that they had to design for. I thought it was just so inspiring and encouraging to be able to see such a beautiful piece of work in its cohesive nature, from the app and the digital experience that you that have of it where you press the screen to get your geolocated stamp – if you press the screen lightly you get a very light imprint of the stamp and if you press it harder you get a much darker imprint of the stamp. That kind of thinking has such charm to it. 

There’s also the fact that it visualises a network of places and spaces in such a thoughtful way, using those landmarks and interests so that even as an outsider, when you look at all of the individual stamps, you can feel the memories or the thing that that place is known for. It encourages you to travel. For me, that's just top. It's timeless – it's just such a gorgeous expression of art direction and solving a business problem fundamentally, visually, rather than writing your way out of a problem. It's got such a romantic expression to it that makes you inquisitive about the next station and the next station and the next station. I just think it's absolutely brilliant. 

Of course Channel 4, from a visual perspective, you can't fault that. It's the integration between the visualisation, the CG and 3D motion of it. Everything together makes it so satisfying and viewable again and again, which obviously, for idents, is really important, but as a piece of content as a whole, I've seen it a lot of times, and you discover new things every time you watch it. That is a piece of craft and a piece of art direction that's hugely inspiring. The voiceover has an emotional hold on you, on top of the emotions that you go through visually with all those cookies that are laid for you and the layers of design and art direction that are within each of the fours.

I think it's one of the most interesting juries, actually, as we had the media people in the room, but we also had creatives in the room. And it's interesting to discover the effectiveness of picking the right media together with the right creative. 

In a way, it was, as always, a little bit difficult to really understand the media part of the thing, because everything is media that we're doing today. So what is media? Good use of traditional media is media. Good use of non-traditional media is media. Good use of products, shoes, or whatever, is a new form of media. So, it's pretty hard to judge things against each other. I think we probably had all the cases that were in other categories also in Media.

We have fully integrated cases where everything is done right, starting with social, getting to content, to a classical campaign, to interaction – the perfect use of media. So we would say ‘this is a perfect integrated case’, in terms of media, because they'd pulled all the strings correctly that they could for media. But on the other side, we’d have one post during the Super Bowl or one interesting, beautiful little app. Suddenly, it comes up in the discussions when it gets tight at the top, that we have a beautiful app and we have a fully-integrated case that ran over over eight months or whatever. They compete against each other for the final Yellows or whatever. Ultimately, I think we picked a nice range to prove what you can do with media. How can you use media in the right way? Either full scope or very little? And I think that makes it very interesting.

The first entry door that we committed ourselves to is: ‘is it really very good work?’. That's what we put on the shortlist. 

Then, the discussions got tighter about ‘what is the media part of it?’. Is the media the starting point, or the centre of the idea? Then you can discuss it up and down. 

It was a really lovely jury, I have to say. We discussed, but at the end, we all had the same feeling. There was no one in the room who would not agree. So we picked three Yellow Pencils for the Media category. 

CeraVe is a fully integrated campaign. It started off with social, with some guerrilla things, and it ended with a Super Bowl spot. So, we thought this must have been planned through for a couple of months, from the beginning to the end, pulling all the right strings to use the media to follow the idea, to build it up and to reveal it. So, it was a fully-integrated campaign that was based on the right choice of media at the right time. That's why we said this was a perfect, more or less traditional way of using the media in the right way. Whatever we learn about integrated campaigns, this is how it should work. It should not be one idea that is then pushed throughout all the media, but it should have timing – a build up to the peak. That's why we chose that one as a Yellow. 

On the other side, we also chose the delivery app, Delivery Hero in Argentina that is amazingly fresh. The app is the media and data plays out on an app with an interesting call to action. So that was interesting.

It was a push notification to Argentinians that they were getting something delivered, and then it was the World Cup, because the whole nation was waiting for the football cup to come to Argentina. It was a very clever use of a simple push notification – people agreed and then they saw the cup flying over to Argentina and they went crazy. If you compare it to CeraVe, it is a push notification – amazingly simple. As president, I tried to show the variety of possible things for the category. You can't only win the Yellow for a fully integrated CeraVe thing. You can also win with a push notification. It's the right [media] for the right time. It's totally in the culture of the nation.

The third one is Coors. I really love that piece as it is a very unusual way of reacting spontaneously to something that happens to a media billboard. And suddenly, this billboard becomes the starting point of a whole campaign. They created the can with a black square – all the other mediums – it went into the ads, into outdoor, to Japan, and the guy who hit the ball became famous, even if he was not sponsored by Coors. They used him and his fame to create buzz. Reacting in real time to an incident and then pulling the right strings to bring it to a product on the cans. And the can became a medium itself again, and referred back to the fanbase. Again, it jumped into the culture. 

There were others that were also good, of course. In the end, the Yellow Pencil is still a very, very hard thing to receive. It's really tough if you have in a category only three Yellows, and I think we were pretty generous compared to other categories.

This is a great jury. There are a fixed number of people on the Impact council, so how they get on there is a process. They interview you and they make sure that you are somehow related to the field, that the work you're doing that is for purpose, driving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and that you have experience in that in order to judge this. Then they reach out to the entire council for the online judging, and then the final physical jury is nine people. Everybody's coming from a different background – a product designer, people from the advertising industry, an architect.

I learned a lot during this. Some of the discussions that happened around product design, for example, were cases that I had no idea about, and that I never questioned when I saw a brilliant product design. However, when you start digging deeper, you ask: ‘where is the material sourced from?’, ‘what is the sustainable cost factor?’, ‘who's developing it?’, ‘how much are they paying the people that are developing it?’, etc. These are things I never think about. It was a great learning process to actually question all those things.

One of the things which was especially important in this jury is the notion of authenticity, not only from the perspective of whether the work is scam or not, but authenticity in having a purpose to heart. If it's a brand doing it, why did it do it? Is it just because it wanted to greenwash something? Is it because it wanted to do a one off for the optics? Is it just because it wanted to do this as a stunt? That's not authentic enough. It's still good that it’s moving in that direction, but the work that has risen to the top – you can see that there is a deeper interest in getting that done. Whether it's because the brand ethos is closer to that cause or because it helps the product itself. 

Look at something like Ariel that has been doing the 'Share the Load' campaign for the last 20 years, convincing men to do laundry. You don't have to buy Ariel to end up doing laundry as a man. So, from a brand perspective, the brand love can rise, but that lifts all boats as well. It’s helping every single product. But that shows you that, for them, the cause is bigger than just 'buy more of our product'. There’s a general category message that they're sending out. But it raises lots of really interesting debates around how real is this as a cause, as a solution? And then there's a factor of whether it even works as a solution.

So, there's a lot of scrutiny. This is probably the most responsible category because it sends out a very strong message of what we expect people, brands, corporations to do – as they should be doing. And you need to make sure that you don't pick something where somebody comes back and says 'but that didn't really work'. So it took a long time, but there's that factor of authenticity, right? 

The creativity was a very major part of it, because that helps you separate. There's a tonne of projects that people do that still end up working out for the cause. The way to differentiate the more creative ones is where the solution was intelligent, strategic and insightful. That's the first part of it. How good is the thinking? 

For Renault 'Plug Inn', the problem was most people don't buy electric vehicles because they think that when they go out to the countryside, they won't have a place to charge their cars and they might run out. So they created this Airbnb style, mobile connect with whoever has a charger out there in the countryside. And a lot of people who do can rent it out to people, generate a profit out of it, and you get to charge your car. Really simple, intelligent thinking. So that's the first aspect of it. Was the thinking innovative? And that's where creativity comes in – through a strategic insight, or through research that gives you that really good solution. 

The second part of it is the crafting. Was it created really well? One case that I spoke about today was the ‘Shellmet'. It's so beautiful. The solution might seem obvious to you, but nobody did it for all this while. They took all these seashells which were getting thrown away – the calcium deposits were bad for the soil – and recycled them into these beautiful helmets. The poetry there is all about how a seashell protects what's inside. And they've made it into a helmet to protect your head. That's what designers do. That's what creatives do – not only strategically engineer the solution, but also take care to make sure that it works from a craft level. In the past, there was often a compromise between a really cool product I wanted to buy versus the environmentally friendly item, which didn’t look cool. Here's a product, suddenly, that's environmentally friendly, is good for the planet and the people, and looks fucking cool. So now you don't have an excuse. It's kind of like when you eat healthy – you're not going to have burgers, which taste damn good – you're gonna have a salad. But then, if the salad also tastes really good, you don't have an excuse. I think that's where the craft comes in to be really, really important. 

I think we’ve moved along quite a bit. Paco [Conde, fellow jury member] put it really well: “There was a time when brands used to pick a cause like they picked a celebrity. 'This fits my brand well'. I think we moved on from there, because it feels like a lot of brands are now doing it because they do want skin in that game.”

I'll take the example of Ariel, again, who's been doing this for the last eight or nine years. I don't know where the team’s minds were when they started – they might have thought that, strategically, this makes sense. And it was a very bold thing to do, and very risky but they did it. Then, they probably saw that it worked out really well as a result, and that's important too. It needs to do well for the brand…  as the brand is a business at the end of the day. The credit to them is that they stayed on that path. They not only said ‘we will not deviate from this as a cause’, but added ‘we will be consistent with this, this is our mission. We'll keep doing new things within that cause’. Every year it  comes up with a new insight, a new execution. That, to me, is how we've changed. Where we were 20 years ago, maybe Ariel would have done a print ad that said, 'Hey, husbands, do the laundry with your wife'. But that won't work anymore. 

Going back to authenticity, how are you as a company invested? MasterCard gets a lot of really good stuff. They'll build the product still embedded into their infrastructure. You can tell that it's not a side project. CSR was always considered, like 2.5% of our budget on the side. 

We launched something in Pakistan recently, and it was a really lovely project we took to a fintech client there. When we approached them, we thought they would do it as a smaller project. But, they liked it so much, they built an entire campaign. That's the shift that's happened, I think. Because there is data – there is absolute data that shows that that is good for your company, and that it's good for your employees – people find that you're a purposeful brand that's standing for the right things. That is good for your bottom line. It makes more customers come to you. And that's good for the soul, for the planet, and for the people. It's completely win-win. If somebody is greenwashing, they get called out very quickly. People's bullshit meter has got more sensitive as well. And there's regulation, rightly so. You will be called out. That forces companies to really think that through, and be good in every aspect.

We gave out three White Pencils in the Impact category. Future Impact doesn't get White. And there's one White Pencil in Sustained Impact. I think Sustained impact is going to become the most important category, because it establishes the partnership between the brand and the cause it represents. ‘How serious are you about this?’. It's not just about generating an incremental increase in results over five years, it's about ‘what did you do to increase those?’. 

Ariel kept reinventing the campaign. There are lots of brands that have done that. Microsoft has done that, MasterCard's done that. All of these people have causes that they pick. We work with An-Nahar in Lebanon that does it year after year for justice and institutions. We were talking in the jury room where Harsh [Kapadia], our jury president, said that this should be the pencil to win. As a brand owner, you should want the sustained impact pencil. Not only have you done it well this year, you've been doing it well for the last eight years. That should be incredibly difficult to win. And that requires a lot of commitment and sacrifice.