Jo Jackson on D&AD’s Commitment to Celebrating Human Craft
Appointed chief executive officer of advertising’s D&AD awards show and festival at the end of 2022, Jo Jackson is a seasoned creative with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Having helped shape brands such as Diesel and MADE.COM as well as establishing her own fashion brand, Beyond the Valley, she has created marketing campaigns to attract and engage with the next generation of consumers.
Throughout her experience, it’s Jo’s commitment to inclusion and making the industry more accessible which has anchored her beliefs. Now, as part of D&AD and working on initiatives such as New Blood and Shift, as well as her own passion projects, she’s come full circle from her initial business of supporting young designers with her fashion label. As D&AD returned this year, in person for the first time since covid-19, the sell-out event included talks from brands such as Patagonia and masterclasses from Adobe Creative Suite, further celebrating its commitment to making the creative industry a more accessible place for all.
Sitting down with LBB’s Nisna Mahtani, Jo explains how celebrating craft is interwoven with sustainability considerations during the event, and how the future of judging criteria is being shaken up by AI.
LBB> You studied at Central Saint Martins before creating the Beyond the Valley, fashion label. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey which led you to this?
Jo> My journey with Beyond the Valley started 20 years ago. I was one of the privileged few who had knowledge of Central Saint Martins as a university. I walked past it in central London, saw the people who went in and thought, ‘I want to be one of those people’. It was a lucky insight to have at a young age, and so I worked hard to be able to go. However – and this isn’t a hit to CSM as it’s one of the best universities in the world – I didn’t personally feel like it equipped me for the real life of working in the creative industry.
I learnt amazing things about graphics, photography, typography, hosted design and all of these beautiful craft-based skills, but in terms of the social skills and the soft skills that you needed 20 years ago (and also today), there was this missing gap, particularly for those that maybe didn't want to go into an advertising agency at that time.
I created Beyond the Valley with a few friends, and it was simply just to help young designers who wanted to create their own product and get it out there. That was really the starting point of my career, and that's where I initially gravitated to - supporting designers. Since then, my career has kind of gone full circle with D&AD, as supporting creatives was the thing that started me off in my career.
LBB> When did you first hear about D&AD and how did that play into the impact you want to make with your current role at the awards show?
Jo> So, D&AD is known for its awards. My first exposure was at CSM, looking through the annuals, being inspired by all this incredible work and wanting to be in the book. Winning a yellow pencil is like the Oscar of the industry, right? You want to win that! While gaining work experience, you'd see them on the walls and want to steal them. But the fact that it is a charity, and all of the income that we generate from the awards goes back into creating and supporting emerging designers in the industry - that was the thing that really got me going 20 years ago when I started within the creative industry. So, I'm super humbled to be in this role, to do my best, and to try and help with that.
We've got amazing programmes such as ‘New Blood’ - which has been around as long as I have been alive - for those that can't or don't want to even go into further education as a free fully funded night school, to get into the industry. It has an incredible success rate, with 74% of the alumni getting into the creative industry. We're very proud of that.
LBB> Through D&AD’s initiatives, what are some of the barriers to getting into the industry which you have come across?
Jo> There are actually loads of different cultural and social barriers to the creative industry around the world. We have New Blood and Shift in Germany, Sydney, São Paulo, and New York, and each one of them has its own local challenges in terms of helping emerging talent to get into the industry. Some of them are around race, some of them are around social status, and some are around gender equality. It's been eye-opening and grounding just to understand all of these different challenges.
People tend to assume it's a financial barrier for most, but actually, a lot of places don't have those financial barriers with further education. But, they still have their challenges. Sometimes it’s about bias in the industry, gender, and racial equality. It’s important to address all the local challenges that any young creative might have within their own market. It's definitely not a one-size-fits-all problem that we're finding. One thing that is across the board is a lack of social understanding - the idea that working in the creative industry isn’t a ‘real job’.
LBB> Where does your motivation for creating change in the industry come from? How does that trickle down into other projects you do?
Jo> I don't think there's ever a particular point in my life, it's always been there. It's about just doing the right thing.
The most recent project that I did was when I just kind of quit everything in the commercial world. I started a sideline in hospitality and opened a few bars and restaurants with my husband. I opened a pub called The Flowerhouse, and the first project we launched was ‘Light Bar’. It was during that project that I noticed the disparity in the industry. Coming from a retail background, especially with MADE.COM, it was a gender-equal environment - on the board level there was a 50/50 split male-female split. And then I went into hospitality, and I was like ‘Where are all the women?’.
Four out of five chefs are male. Only 25% of the leadership in hospitality is female, and so I used my experience around branding, together with the insight that what I saw happening could be considered a fatality, and addressed it by creating The Flowerhouse as a community-led space to support women in hospitality. I was also keen to involve women in their 60s and 70s - who wanted to work and didn’t want to retire - as an opportunity to be able to meet people and have interactions.
LBB> Can you tell us about some of the themes of D&AD this year and how it ties into the ‘MAKE. CHANGE.’ motto?
Jo> We had some hesitations around doing the event in person this year, as we really weren't too sure how people were going to receive it. Was it going to be something that everyone was going to run to, or there was going to be some hesitation? As it turns out, it sold out. So, we’ll keep that in mind for the next one, as we'd really scaled this year’s back in anticipation. Also, we intentionally scaled it back from a sustainability point of view, getting rid of all of the stuff that would just end up in a landfill. Keeping things as carbon-neutral as possible was a big point for us.
The other thing is that we wanted to focus on the craft, the making, and the tactility that goes behind everything. There's a whole load of craft-based stuff in the design aspect, from beautiful type design to incredible photography, cinematography, and even things like casting; there are the skills which are there, which are human skills, and are to be celebrated. So, we wanted to make sure that we were mindful of the human aspect of that craft, as creatives.
LBB> You mention the human craft aspect of this year, but how are you considering the use of AI within the judging process?
Jo> There have been some really interesting debates in the judging rooms around AI. And I think we, collectively – meaning me and the D&AD board of trustees and our advisory boards – are glad to have incredible people around us who donate their time for free to help us shape our organisation and also things like our criteria for our judging. I think we need to address the criteria for AI for next year. There were a couple of entries - one in particular that I heard about was entirely created by AI - and the question was, can we even award something when nobody created it? My response is that well, somebody must have created it. But who do we award that to? And how do we consider the intellectual property or something like that?
I don't have the answers. I can't even begin to start. But, I'm very keen to have those discussions and debates around that, and I definitely think we're going to need to add some criteria about AI into our creative awards. Particularly for the craft-based people who are stalwarts in that, but we will need to address that next year, for sure.
