Events
Five things we learnt at D&AD 2024
Alex Blyth
Managing Partner
Last week creatives from around the world splashed their way through the London Spring rain (thankfully not getting as wet as our Prime Minister) to the South Bank Centre for this year’s D&AD conference.
Over two days we listened to juries explaining their awards selections, studios sharing some of their best work, experts, innovators and rising stars sharing their perspectives, and legends looking back over their careers. It was a fascinating couple of days, and here are five things we learnt.
1. Only 177 UK studios are accredited Real Living Wage Employers
Lanne Adeleye, Junior Brand Designer and Co-Founder of The Junior, made a compelling case for creative agencies to look again at the salaries they pay at entry level. These new arrivals are of course the future of our industry. They matter, yet only 177 UK studios have signed up to pay the Real Living Wage (£24k for a 35-hour working week in London).
Lanne pointed to the example set by Pablo and St Lukes where minimum salaries are £30k. While that might be a stretch for many, £24k really ought to be achievable for all.
2. Our industry is working out AI
Unsurprisingly, AI came up a lot. Priya Prakash, CTO at Design for Social Change, gave a brilliant analogy: AI answering a creative brief is like putting a chameleon on a mirror – it turns a dismaying grey.
But others were far more positive. Some, like the founders of REHAB, were perhaps too positive – they’ve invented a tool that they is “essentially a strategy partner”, and will “free up creative teams to do creative work”. We’ll still need a “human in the loop” they reassured us, but most of the creative teams I know would want a strategy human with their capacity for iterative thinking to be more than just ‘in the loop’ of the creative process. For now anyway...
Yasu Susaki, Dentsu’s Global CCO, stayed on safer AI ground, giving us three examples of work that’s been made possible by AI. Panasonic’s 21 Ways to Charge a Battery campaign, the Nikkei/Dentsu Wellbeing Index, and their Japanese Railway stamps were all beautiful pieces of work.
3. “Clients are explicitly asking for brand worlds at a rate we’ve never seen before”
That’s what Leland Maschmeyer, COLLINS Co-Founder, said. He and business partner, Brian Collins, charted the history of our industry, from applied art pre-1920s, to graphic design, communications design, brand design, and now brand world.
They believe that for agencies to thrive today they need to deliver brand worlds, and they’ve re-engineered COLLINS around that principle, still delivering visual and verbal identities but now also working with clients on where and with whom they show up.
Their guiding principle is visionary and inspiring: make the future so irresistible it becomes inevitable
4. Authorship matters
Design legend Peter Saville took us on a tour of his career from Factory Records singles, to rebranding his home city Manchester, to making the crosses on England football shorts multicoloured way back in 2004 when no one kicked up a fuss about it, and finally to doing the one thing Lacoste told him never to do: mess with the crocodile.
He looked at it all through the lens of authorship – how he’s always retained some degree of authorship of his work and how that matters as a creative where so often we’re simply a mouthpiece for the ideas of others. It was a thought provoking take on the profession.
5. Everyone loves 4 Creative’s idents
They were the story of the awards night, and rightly so. If somehow you’ve not seen them, take a look.
