D&AD Impact is a new awards scheme set up jointly by D&AD and Advertising Week to celebrate the power of creativity to stimulate positive change, in a world that desperately needs all creative people to turn their attention to ‘doing well by doing good’.
D&AD Impact will launch during the D&AD and Advertising Week Festivals in April 2016 and the inaugural judging and awards will take place in September 2016, during Advertising Week New York.
These awards are intended to reach out beyond D&AD’s and Advertising Week’s established community, to embrace start-ups, technology companies, social enterprises and the worlds of media and entertainment; in short any enterprise or category where the power of creative thinking and the application of great ideas is having a positive, transformative impact, on whatever scale.
We are/have recruited our judges from the wide world of business, communication, arts, music, politics and media. And we have established a dozen categories that truly reflect the changing face of business in the 21st century.
We have reserved D&AD’s coveted White Pencil as the key D&AD Impact award, with Wood, Graphite and (on rare occasions) Black Pencils also in the hierarchy.
The White Pencil has been an increasingly important part of D&AD’s activity over the last four years, stimulating awareness of the need to embrace purpose alongside profit and helping the industry develop the language, tools, processes and capabilities to drive the ‘for good’ agenda.
D&AD Impact is, in many respects a continuation and an expansion of the White Pencil project. Because an issue of this importance deserves and requires it’s own time, place, name and focus.
It’s sometimes said that advertising and design awards schemes encourage the misdirection of creative energy and talent. D&AD Impact will do exactly what the name implies – which is to celebrate, stimulate and enable ideas that have had a real impact in the real world, and which have had a positive influence on people, business and the planet.
