Purpose is temporary; creativity is permanent.

Looking back on a year of awards judging, in an industry that's beginning to mumble about creativity again, but doesn't yet have the nerve to shout about it.

I was interested to read this recent editorial by Gideon Spanier in Campaign, now marking its final print edition. The editorial casts a melancholy eye backward, but mainly looks forward to the challenges ahead. In all of it, it’s notable that the word ‘purpose’ doesn’t feature once. But creativity looms large. Key quote: “Commercial creativity is still at the heart of advertising. It is the soul of the industry and at the core of building brands.”

What particularly caught my eye was the Jeremy Bullmore story about Aston Martin related above—a story about the enduring power of brand building through commercial creativity.

It comes across as a tale from another era, but that’s not entirely the case. This year, I was head of the Writing for Design jury at D&AD and it transpired that Aston Martin was the sole Yellow Pencil winner in the category. Here’s a snapshot of the work in question—I suggest taking a minute to read the long copy (click images to enlarge).

What do you think?

The work is part of a larger campaign that involves intricately visualised biometric data and high-production films with a Tom Hiddleston voiceover. [Correction: have been told it’s not Tom Hiddleston, but someone who sounds uncannily like him!] I suspect the long copy above was a relatively low-cost element, but to me it’s the best thing about it. I like the way it takes a potentially clichéd starting point (the time-honoured car ad brief of conveying the experience of driving a performance car) and pushes it, through sheer force of good writing, somewhere more compelling and persuasive.

The copy is densely researched and full of specifics. Looking just at the first one, it’s written with a fine sense of rhythm and sensitivity to individual word choice—interesting little phrases like “When you slow down this fast” or “arm your left foot”, or the recurring references to otherworldly, alien and space-age that echo the mood of the image. And the whole thing builds towards a deft double-ending. You could almost end it after ‘halt’ and it would be one way to tie up a long-copy ad. But then there’s that extra ‘In a way that makes your heart stop’ that ties the physical experience to the emotional, and nails the dismount in a way that justifies the extended build-up. It’s not a stretch to imagine a 14-year-old reading that ad, or watching one of the films, and deciding they’re going to buy one 30 years later.

I suspect some readers will have questions. Is ‘Intensity. Driven’ too familiar a position for a car brand? Is anyone going to read copy when it’s laid out in one big chunk like that? Is the writing excellent for its category, or just good? All fair questions, but note how they’re all questions of creativity and craft: the kind of questions that it’s interesting to discuss in a panel of writers and designers who have some domain knowledge in that area.

You can ask other questions too. Is it socially purposeful? Should we be awarding ads for gas-guzzling cars? Especially the kind of cars only affordable to a wealthy elite? And isn’t that line in the copy about “the sort of educational background parents would subtly name-drop to their friends” a bit privileged and uninclusive?

All fair questions if you’re judging social purpose awards, where the work wouldn’t get beyond the first round and probably wouldn’t be entered at all. All unfair questions if you’re judging creative awards that are sold to paying entrants as being about creativity and craft, but where too many judges still feel at liberty to mark work down on social purpose grounds. This is especially the case when it comes to the best-in-show Black Pencil awards, where it’s common to hear arguments like “I just don’t feel it’s the right signal to send out” or “This cause means so much to me and I just think it’s really important we award it”. The ultimate creative accolade is how it’s billed, but not always how it’s judged.

For the record, this doesn’t mean I think Aston Martin should have won a Black Pencil. Rather than being ‘ground-breaking’ in its category, its strength is that it takes an extremely conventional position and turns it up to eleven. That’s a hard thing to do creatively, but maybe it’s not Black-Pencil-hard. When I was involved in the Black Pencil judging, I advocated for it as professionally as I could, but was happy for people to make their own call.

In the end, the only two Black Pencils went to a Pharrell Williams video, which had a strong case as an example of groundbreaking excellence in a creative craft; and to Heartbeat Drum Machine, which had the following wind of a feel-good charity story, but which was nevertheless a great example of product design in its own right. On the whole, I saw it as a half-encouraging sign, in that purpose work isn’t getting quite as easy a ride to the top as was once the case. But there were no Black Pencils for actual commercial creativity—a brilliant ad or a great piece of branding—because the bigger step is yet to be taken. Judges once again need to get used to the idea of giving Black Pencils to pure commercial creativity, without the warm feeling they got during the purpose years.

Particularly when it comes to the top awards, you can still feel the purpose question hovering over all the conversations. I suspect it makes life harder for an ad like McDonald’s Raise Your Arches, which was widely hailed for its brilliant craft and imaginative use of brand codes, but which is still an ad for a big, bad, corporate marketer of meat. Similarly, British Airways was hailed for the craft of its writing, but it’s still an ad for an airline—and one that centres on promoting flying for the most spurious of reasons. I had an interesting conversation about that one over here.

You can argue the creative merits of either campaign. But for me, it should be entirely possible to believe McDonald’s and BA are Black Pencil-worthy creatively and still have reservations about them ethically. It’s the ultimate creative accolade, and not all creative brilliance is going to fit a particular purpose agenda. There’s no squaring that circle, but the industry continually does its best to dissolve the distinction in a warm soup of positive-sounding vibes.

A few years ago, it was the D&AD President saying “The best creativity has a social purpose”—an explicit signal to judges that Black Pencils were for the socially progressive stuff. This year, the new D&AD CEO doesn’t put it quite that strongly, but the same signal is still being sent:

We believe that great creative work creates better outcomes for all. Do we? Does a good McDonald’s ad create better outcomes for all? Does an Aston Martin ad create better outcomes for all? Did ‘Labour isn’t working’ create better outcomes for all? Did Fearless Girl create better outcomes for the employees suing State Street at the time, or the female artist in her legal dispute with them? What creative excellence stood for 61 years ago is different from what we would celebrate as excellence today. Is it? Have great, lateral, surprising ideas stopped being great, lateral and surprising? Has humour stopped being funny? Have rhyme and alliteration and pace and craft malfunctioned?

Of course, the commercial and social context continually changes. 61 years ago, cigarette ads were legal and eligible for awards; now they’re not. 10 years from now, it might be car or airline ads. People are entitled to campaign vigorously in those areas and one day the law might change, or awards schemes might stop taking the entry money. But right now, those entries are valid and it’s unethical to take the money based on creative entry criteria, then allow or encourage judges to mark them down for non-creative reasons. The only place where the meaning of ‘creative excellence’ changes is in that fuzzy gap between taking the entry money and giving out the prizes.

And it’s not enough for awards schemes to say, ‘We leave it to the judges to make these calls’ when there are so many clear nudges from D&AD Presidents and CEOs in this direction. After so much purposeful work in recent years, many judges now feel there’s something missing if it isn’t there. Yes, it’s a great ad, but I’m not getting that righteous swelling in my chest; I’m not getting the feeling that we’re leading a noble fight; I can’t go home with a sense I’ve sent an important signal that reflects well on me morally. There’s this lingering feeling that, for the work to be ‘ground-breaking’, it needs to be pushing a progressive cause in an inspiring way.

It’s hard for the more rigorous and responsible creative judges to push against that, and they need support from D&AD to do it. (I’m focusing on D&AD because they’re great and they matter—Cannes will continue doing its own weird lap dance for corporations throwing dollar bills.)

I was also involved in the judging for the Brand Impact Awards this year, where there’s a separate Social Purpose category, in which work is explicitly judged on its social aspirations and impact. I ended up taking part in both the creative judging for the Writing for Design category, and the Social Purpose judging. And you see how it leads to the same projects being discussed in entirely different ways, against two entirely different sets of criteria. That’s exactly as it should be.

For me, the social purpose judging still left a lot to be desired—you end up in a position of having to judge work based on a handful of impact metrics that are hard to evaluate, and often involving new work that hasn’t had much time to make an impact in any case. My sense is that social purpose awards are too important to be judged simply as an extra category in a scheme set up to judge creativity. You really need a different kind of judging model—one that asks entrants to supply much more context, maybe invites them in to talk to the judges, encourages independent research and fact-checking, and involves sector experts, academics and journalists who know how to do some digging behind the headlines. Case study videos with stirring music don’t cut it.

To speak above my station, here’s what I’d advise creative awards schemes (and D&AD in particular) to do:

1. First, guard the creative excellence core with your life. Once people stop believing in that, the whole game is up. The entire structure, including all the great outreach and education work, is undermined—and it’s been wobbling for years now. Make it clear to judges, and especially Black Pencil judges, that creativity is what they are here to judge. No ambiguity, no warm soup. Ask judges to abstain if they have ethical objections to any work. Make it clear that an ad for the Conservative party, the Labour party, McDonald’s or Greenpeace could win. No judge can be completely unbiased about social and political issues, but they can all be asked to try their hardest, just as we ask criminal jurors not to send someone down just because they’re a Brexit voter or a United fan.

2. Second, talk constantly about creativity. Not as a brief tribute before switching to more progressive and social justice ground. Do it like you believe it. For example, as far as I can see, Aston Martin’s Yellow-Pencil-winning work wasn’t featured anywhere in the D&AD ‘trend report’ this year, maybe because it doesn’t fit into any narrative about inclusion or sustainability. It was simply an example of good, long-form writing. But why not do trend reports about actual creative trends? Copy-led campaigns; the return of the billboard as a central medium; CGI and faux-OOH; a revival in brand codes like the Domino’s yodel or McDonald’s eyebrows; the trend for 3-minute brand films over 30-second ads. All these questions are interesting creatively, wherever you stand on any political spectrum. Let’s talk about them—it’ll be fun. D&AD gathers together many interesting judges every year. Interview them, get them to interview each other, get them to write stuff, publish a Penguin paperback-size book every year full of topical opinions and insights, then list all the winners and credits at the back with the work itself on the website.

3. Once you have done steps one and two, you are then in a much stronger position to do brilliant things around inclusion, outreach and education. I respect how D&AD reaches out to underprivileged young people and gives them alternative pathways into the industry—and I expect that will expand with the excellent appointment of Jack Renwick as president. I also welcome any talk about changing the industry in a way that makes more people want to stay. But the way to do that is to talk confidently about creativity. What’s the appeal of an industry that doesn’t believe in itself, or doesn’t even seem to like itself? An industry that gives out awards where everyone knows there’s a game being played? Pay the bills with your massive accounts for corporate clients, then win the awards with some free work for a social cause that you can then blanket-enter across 25 categories.

The answer isn’t to convince young people that this industry is something it isn’t—we’re not selling stuff, we’re changing the world! It’s to equip young people with creative skills, coupled with a relentless curiosity about other people and what they think. Then tell them many options lie open for them. You can use your skills to go exclusively into charity and not-for-profit branding—many people spend their careers doing valuable work in that area. You might veer more into artistic and self-initiated work—what a great way to spend a life. Or you might throw yourself into agency life and work for a burger chain one day and a human rights charity the next. You might treat it all as a way to pay the rent while you find purpose outside work. Or you might turn your work into your life, in a way that only you can work out. But it’s not about some bullshit vision of ‘changing the system from within’ by eating croissants and shuffling yellow post-its around in VMLY&RWundermanThompson or whatever they’re called now.

It’s a positive sign that we have Campaign editorials talking about reclaiming the creative narrative. It’s a positive sign that the D&AD CEO talks about being “the campaigner for creative excellence, always”. But so far, it’s all throat-clearing. If the industry wants to face down the twin threats of AI and the economic downturn, it needs to get serious about creativity. And the great news is that creativity is needed more than ever in this climate. It remains a massively hard thing to take a dry business plan or charity mission statement and translate it into powerful visual and verbal memes that get inside the culture, get remembered and get acted upon. It takes lateral thinking, hard-won craft skills, cognitive empathy, and the confidence to pursue ideas that seem irrational or counterintuitive at first sight. Creativity isn’t the sole preserve of advertising and design, but these are two industries where it’s the entire job: something you’re forced to deliver day in, day out, for clients who desperately need the magical element they usually can’t do themselves. Agencies are still capable of doing it brilliantly, usually in places far removed from awards schemes.

Purpose is an unserious fad that is already getting written out of Campaign editorials about the future of the industry. Creativity mattered 61 years go, and will matter 61 years from now. I’d love to hear more people shouting about it.

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For anyone new here, I’m a writer of poetry, downbeat diaries, branding and advertising projects, articles for Creative Review and The Guardian, books about design, and occasional songs. Thoughts on Writing uses language as a way into wider cultural and political issues.