D&AD stands for Design and Art Direction, and is a British educational charity set-up to promote excellence in design and advertising.
The art directors and designers responsible for establishing the charity are David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes.
A judging panel gives out yellow pencils every year for exceptional work in a number of different categories including writing for advertising, press advertising, graphic design, and many more.
Black pencils are only given out to truly outstanding work. Normally 2-3 are awarded every year but in 2003 none were awarded.
This year's yellow pencils have already been awarded. Black pencils will be announced in September at a larger event than normal, to celebrate the awards' 50th anniversary.
Creative Review has a lovely long article about this year's yellow pencils which is certainly worth a read. Below are a selection of some of the ads that stood out to me as particularly brilliant.
BETC Paris' bear ad for the movie channel from Canal+ is pure advertainment. A comparison of this ad with the Christmas 2011 ad for Sky Movies is not a very flattering comparison for WCRS in terms of originality and imagination. Without criticising the Sky ad too much, because I do genuinely like it, WCRS's ad is a nostalgic mashup that is, quite frankly, a penny a dozen on Youtube, while BETC's high-quality original content is about aspiration. I know which emotion speaks to me more as a consumer.
The other winner in the TV & Film category was this fantastic ad from BBH for Barnardo's. I've not got too much to say about it. It's a fantastically crafted and thought out ad which inspires compassion and, most importantly, hope in the viewer.
The JWT Melbourne mobile ad was another fantastically clever piece of work which recalls every advertiser's favourite example of short copy, Ernest Hemingway's six word tale:
For sale: Baby shoes, never used.
It was interesting to see Wieden + Kennedy pick up a pencil for digital for their "bespoke album creation experience" for Kaiser Chiefs, mainly because I was aware of the project without expecting that an ad agency had worked on it. The ad made waves but I was never sufficiently interested in it to have my own "bespoke album creative experience".
72 and Sunny's campaign for K-Swiss on the other hand, which also won a pencil for digital, was one that I really enjoyed and engaged with as it came out.
In such a crowded marketplace as trainers / sneakers / training shoes, 72 and Sunny found a gap in the market that was totally powerful and somehow found a new niche in the market for the brand image of K-Swiss to occupy. The ad applies all of the attitude, bad-assery and humour that Kenny Powers has displayed in Eastbound and Down onto the K-Swiss brand, but perhaps most importantly of all utilizes the power of the HBO show's cult following. This was a really risky ad unlike anything seen in the market before.
McCann Erickson Bucharest won a pencil for Integrated and Earned for their fantastic campaign for Rom candy bars. This was another campaign I was aware of at the time; in fact, it was all a really smart, really manipulative piece of trolling.
More than anything, this campaign shows that even risky strategies like generating anger can be worthwhile.
Those are my favourites, but I highly recommend spending 10 or 15 minutes on the Creative Review piece which shows a full list of the winners.
This post started with the question: what does D&AD mean?
D&AD means taking a risk. D&AD means making something new, that no-one before has thought of, and that most importantly evokes a strong emotional reaction.
Hope that you can make it back tomorrow. I'll be taking a closer look into what makes a black pencil. Until then.
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