D&AD: At the Sharp End

Almost 50 years on and one of the most coveted prizes in advertising is still the Black and Yellow Pencil. Tim Cumming takes a trip down memory lane with D&AD’s chief executive Tim Lindsay and previous winners to where it all began, and the disastrous consequences budget cutting has for talent

Just as you get a Plimsoll line in shipping, so a pencil line runs through the design and communications industry, in the form of D&AD’s coveted Black and Yellow Pencils. For the likes of Sir Alan Parker, pioneer of British television advertising, film director, and D&AD’s president in 1976, the Pencil was and will remain the ultimate award in the industry. “All I ever wanted was to win more Pencils,” he says of his years in advertising, “but you find that as you win more awards – and I’ve been fortunate to have won a few with 14 films – you realise how ugly they are. I have a huge shelf of ugly awards, while the Pencil is so beautiful, so simple and so well designed. As it ought to be.”

A brotherhood of rule-breakers

Parker’s career started in the early 60s at Collett Dickenson Pearce, at about the same time as D&AD was launched. “There was a great brotherhood at that time,” he recalls, “of knowing that what we were trying to do was to break the rules that had gone before in order to do more interesting work. The designers were at the forefront of that more than the advertising people. They were the ones who started D&AD. The great Colin Millward, creative director at CDP, (who was awarded D&AD’s first President’s Award for outstanding creativity by Parker himself in 1976), was probably the most influential of all of us. Modern advertising owes everything to him. He always had the vision of what D&AD could be, which was to push forward for better work, more creative work.”

A charity with an educational remit rather than a commercial organisation, D&AD turns 50 next year and has a new president, Rosie Arnold of BBH – only the second female president in its history – who herself has been well awarded for her work, particularly with Lynx, including the Cannes gold-winning spot Ideal Woman, and the Yellow Pencil winners: Getting Dressed and Get In There. She is presiding over ambitious new initiatives not only to mark the creative charity’s first half century, but to anticipate the future of communications, and even setting the agenda in an ever-changing media landscape, just as its founders set out to do in 1962.

“D&AD began,” says chief executive Tim Lindsay, sitting with Rosie Arnold in a spacious meeting room at their London base, “as a group of designers and art directors, among them the late Terence Donovan and David Bailey. One of the very early credos was ‘stimulation not congratulation’,” he adds. “It was about identifying, celebrating and then recording the very best design and advertising work.”

They still have, in their archive, D&AD’s first annual. “It was really a slim brochure like an exhibition guide, and we have two copies left in the safe. D&AD really started from there.” Its latest issue, 49, is printed on paper recycled from nappies and runs to almost 600 pages, with the year’s Black and Yellow Pencils going to, among others, W&K Portland’s Old Spice, Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown, YouTube Life In A Day, the iPad, and Google’s Chrome Fast from BBH New York. You don’t have to be a genius to spot the dominance of digital work across the board.

At the first awards in 1963 there were 25 judges and 2,500 pieces of work from the UK. Last year, D&AD had work from 43 countries with 23,000 entries and 380 judges. The communications industry, the world and its technology has grown exponentially since 1962. “Back then they were experimenting with television and making the most of this, relatively speaking, new medium,” says Lindsay, an industry veteran who started in advertising in 1977 and was chairman of Publicis then president of TBWA before becoming D&AD’s new CEO this August. “In the mid 60s, television was 10 years old in the UK. Alan Parker and all those people who were mainly associated with CDP at the time, would shoot commercials in the basement, doing experimental work. That’s how Alan Parker started off.”

“It began very simply,” recalls Parker, “two people sitting at a table, a locked-off camera. The art director was very good at lighting, someone else could work the Nagra tape recorder and I was the only one who couldn’t do anything, so they said, as you’ve written the thing you’d better say ‘action’. Then suddenly I’ve got very fancy ideas and the commercials became more complicated and ambitious.”

Stimulation not congratulation

Perhaps the only constant since those pioneering basement shoots has been the pace of change. “D&AD has an archive of 50 years of the best advertising and design,” says Lindsay, “but it has always been about looking forward. It’s about celebrating excellence and it’s about stimulating excellence, while celebrating the role of great creativity in commercial communication. It’s a very practical utility and I think its real role is to stand up for what’s right because what’s right works. There’s an assumption at D&AD that the good stuff works, and there just isn’t enough good stuff. Turn on your television or turn on the computer or walk down the street and you’ll see that a lot of what is done is mediocre,” continues Lindsay. “It takes as much effort to produce that – sometimes more – than it does to make the good stuff. It’s a waste of money, it pollutes everyone’s life, and it doesn’t have to be like that.”

D&AD’s remit, as an educational charity as well as an arbiter of professional and creative excellence via its awards, is to support and stimulate the good stuff. It can, if it feels the year’s work is not up to scratch, decline to give out one of its coveted Pencils – as happened in 2003. It lends the D&AD Pencil just that much more industry kudos, as Arnold, a winner herself, attests. “There’s a real feeling of excellence and rarity in getting a D&AD Pencil. Just getting in the book is pretty high up as an achievement. It still takes pride of place on my mantelpiece, as opposed to others that are doorstops around the house, gathering dust.” Echoing Parker, Arnold describes it as “a beautiful-looking award. There’s a charm and a character to it.”

Fundamental funding mistakes

Arnold studied graphic design at art school in the early 80s and it is thanks to D&AD that she got into the advertising industry. Educational support has been key to its work and development over the years, and she believes that such work has never been more crucial than it is now, in the wake of serious budget cuts in arts funding and education. “I got into advertising because of D&AD,” she affirms. “When I was at art school they didn’t have advertising courses, and it was D&AD’s workshops that helped me build up a portfolio and understand the business and make the contacts with advertising agencies. Now, more than ever, it’s relevant again. I can’t think of a time when that is more relevant because arts funding has been cut so much – most art schools have had their funding cut by 80 per cent. So the courses are drying up and there’s the money that it’s costing students. D&AD’s remit is as an education charity and it’s incredibly important, and will become increasingly so over the coming years.”

“It is, without putting too fine a point on it, unbelievably short-sighted of the government,” adds Lindsay, “given that the creative industries account for seven to eight per cent of gross national product. We’re famous for it and we’re unbelievably good at it. There’s so much evidence that teaching people to be creative as early as you can in their school career has a fantastic effect on their personal development, never mind where they end up professionally.”

The numbers say it all. The much vaunted and heavily protected financial services in the UK – just think of the gargantuan bailout the industry enjoyed in 2008 – make up between five and eight per cent of GDP, depending on the health of the stock market. The creative industries are bringing in eight per cent and growing, while funding in arts education has been decimated. “Where would Apple be without Jonathan Ive?” asks Rosie Arnold. “It’s that interface between technology and design that makes the things so desirable. It feels completely counter-intuitive to cut arts education, and to say, ‘we’re just going to put money into sciences’.”

D&AD’s early educational initiative included its Graphic Workshops with the Royal College of Art in the mid 60s through to the mid 70s. John Hegarty initiated the Students Awards in 1977, followed in 1978 by separate Advertising and Design workshops. For Hegarty, D&AD president in 1989, the key to creativity is not just in mastering the technology and the craft, but in nurturing the ideas-making that fuels every other activity. “That’s what we do in our industry. People sit around and have ideas,” he says. “Creativity is a preoccupation, not an occupation. It’s something you’ve got to believe in.”

What does D&AD provide today, in terms of education, training, networking and support, to new talent coming to the industry, year after year – as well as to the more seasoned pros who regularly check in on D&AD’s lecture series and workshops it runs both nationally and worldwide? “We supply course materials for work in universities and what were art colleges, and we also run transition courses, as people move from being students into professional life,” says Lindsay. “There’s the New Blood programme,” he continues, “which is about the industry taking a look at the people coming out of studenthood.”

New Blood is an umbrella for 120 separate courses, set up 15 years ago, and with its own peripatetic festival, which is about going out and meeting agencies and showcasing work and getting picked. “Then we ran something new this year, the Graduate Academy, which took the 100 top students from the D&AD Student Awards and put them in a boot camp for a week to teach them what professional life’s expectations were going to be.”

50 years of looking forward

A creative boot camp, with drills, assault courses, and lots of shouting? Not quite, thankfully, that ‘good stuff’ tends to come with nurturing, not whiplash. “It’s about how to behave, how to present yourself, what to say and what not to say, and also how to begin to do your job, how you go about creating in design and advertising,” says Lindsay. “And then the top 50 of those were guaranteed proper internships in design and digital and advertising.”

Another new initiative for D&AD is acting as chief lobbyist for the creative industries. It does have form – under New Labour it was involved in a Creative Industries and a Design Commission review. “We feel we do need to step up a bit more and be the voice,” says Arnold, “because the Design Council has gone and there isn’t really an industry voice in terms of lobbying.”

D&AD is soon to move premises, from Vauxhall to Brick Lane, by the Truman Brewery at the centre of 21st-century London’s creative hub. There they’ll be finalising a jury, with Arnold promising some well-known faces, “jaw-dropping names, the cream of the crop. We want the work to be the absolute best and therefore you need the best jury. As simple as that. It’s important how good the person is who judges your work. It has to be people you respect. Otherwise it loses its point.”

Then there is the prospect of the 50th D&AD Annual. “Creatives and students alike regard it as the Bible,” says Arnold . “It’s the book to look through to be inspired and stimulated to do better yourself. It’s a real focus point, and we want next year’s Annual, which is a celebration of the 50th year, to be very special indeed. We have other plans that are above and beyond just entering to get into the awards. There will be an historic and a forward-looking element to it. So don’t just enter to get into this year’s awards; there’s a bigger role to play, a backward look and a forward look. Of all the years to enter, this really is it.”

The strap line to the celebrations is ‘50 years of looking forward’, and to underline that, a new award is coming to the table, the first in D&AD’s history, the White Pencil. “It’s for a piece of creative thinking that changes the world for the better,” says Arnold . “It can be across all disciplines, and what we’re trying to say in light of the government cuts is that creativity really has the power to change things for the better. If you look at the Aids red ribbon, or the UNICEF Tap Project by Droga5. There’s a load of really creative thinking that has made the world a better place.”

Changing the world, if only for a day

With the White Pencil, D&AD is getting behind a single cause it feels will benefit from creative thinking, and can take off on a global scale. Ambitious stuff. “There’s an institution called Peace One Day,” explains Arnold, “run by [filmmaker] Jeremy Gilley, who got a UN resolution in 2001 that 21 September would become a Day of Peace, whether that’s laying down arms so that aid can go and help people who are victims of war, or it’s the [cessation of violence from] drug barons in favelas or just bullies at school.”

Gilley came to the idea in 1999; in 2007, with Jude Law, he went into Afghanistan to spearhead a campaign that resulted in 4.5m children being vaccinated against polio in previously unreachable areas. “So it provides a real benefit,” says Arnold, “and what we need to do is institutionalise it, so that people recognise it in the way they recognise Mother’s Day or Christmas.”

So D&AD put out a brief, again for the first time in its history. “The deal is you have to make it run in some form, so it could be on the internet, or getting Coca-Cola to donate a million dollars. The remit is large and we figured all activity out there will be good activity. So we’ve asked people to engage with the brief and enter next year and then we will be giving the first White Pencil out on 21 September.”

And what if the work that comes in is so effective that a single White Pencil is not enough? “Good question,” muses Rosie Arnold. “There might be more than one.” Lindsay adds: “If you have three fantastic ideas and they’re all completely different then I guess you might.”

While D&AD began as a London-centric organisation, this year, 63 per cent of entries came from overseas, and an increasing number of jurors are international. “What D&AD has got away from was the notion that advertising and design only happened in London,” says Lindsay. “And certainly in advertising, 15 years ago, that was a very prevalent view, even if it wasn’t true…” For decades, Britain ’s standing in advertising, design and communications has been that of a world leader. What, exactly, is its mojo? How has this overcrowded, untidy little island got such a big voice? “It’s cultural,” opines Lindsay. “It’s something to do with language, our inventiveness with language.”

He also points to the quality of British TV. “The BBC was set up to entertain, educate and inform, and it developed into a fantastic broadcasting service. And when ITV formed it had to compete with this very high-standard national broadcaster, and the advertising had to compete with the programmes. That’s why advertising here became as good as it did. You’re competing for people’s attention, and there was a recognition very early on, back in the 60s, that in order to get people’s attention, you had to offer them something in return. A present in return for their present of attention.”

A selection of D&AD presidents
2010 Simon (Sanky) Sankarayya
2009 Paul Brazier
2008 Garrick Hamm
2007 Simon Waterfall
2006 Tony Davidson
2002 Peter Souter
1998 Tim Mellors
1996 Graham Fink
1992 Tim Delaney
1991 Martin Lambie-Nairn
1989 John Hegarty
1981 Martin Boase
1976 Alan Parker
1975 David Abbott
1963 Edward Booth-Clibborn
1962 John Commander

A tsunami of technology

D&AD, of course, has been a key player in that exchange of presents, by dint of its founding mantra, ‘stimulation not congratulation’. It has drawn its pencil down through the decades as great figures have come and gone, and great periods, too. Will future generations look back on its 50th birthday as a high point? While Woody Allen’s latest film Midnight in Paris illustrates how ‘the Golden Age’ is a moveable feast, for the likes of John Hegarty, the most exciting time for creativity is always now. “I look at the audience and I see an audience that wants what we do,” he says. “And I look at the technology, and there’s brilliant ways of doing it now.” He does have caveats, though. “Technology has always been the handmaiden of creativity, but we’ve almost got too much technology. The danger of this tsunami of technology is that people think that technology is the idea. And it’s not. The way of communicating advances all the time. But ultimately it’s about ideas. That’s what we pass on.”

Arnold, who’s worked with Hegarty since joining BBH in 1983, where she has now become deputy executive creative director, adds: “I think we’re at a really interesting stage, because one of the reasons it might have been so extraordinary in the 70s and 80s was that they came to grips with the media and used it brilliantly, and I think that we’re in a similar situation where the media is changing – I worked on Yeo Valley last year and we had a really  fantastic result with the wrappings. And that was using media in a very different way.”

As president of D&AD, as well as a major player at BBH, Arnold is well placed to forecast the shape of commercial communications to come. “You could say we’re having a renaissance because there’s an opportunity to use and understand new media in a different way and we’re coming to terms with it and getting used to it and using it in a fresh way. So I’m an optimist.”

The deadline for entries to the 2012 D&AD Awards is 1 February. For more information on the Awards, student schemes or D&AD events visit dandad.org