D&AD Student Award's Talk

To start with Fergal gave an introduction into what the D&AD Student Awards are all about. Unfortunately as we struggled to find the venue we only caught the end of this and then he introduced Andy from an agency called 'Work Club' which have a number of high profile clients including Alfa Romeo. They do illustration, game design, TV Branding, web design and advertising. The people who gained 2nd place for their HP video entry are currently on a placement there.

Andy spoke about originality and appropriateness being key to creativity and proceeded to engage the audience within an activity where we had to say, left to right, the colours of words which were different colours to what the word described. This got everyones attention and it was funny which I feel is great for an interesting lecture. He spoke about making people care about a product whether it is washing powder or something better.

To do this he spoke about hiring people who can do your job better than you and getting out of the way. I appreciated this as a recent lecturer in our college spoke about not liking to see someone that is better than him which is totally wrong in my opinion. This led onto the idea of insights and truths. I hate the word insight as I hear it too often and find it contrived but he used this in triangles to make things work. This triangle involved Business Objective - Brand - Consumer. He proved that this worked by showing us a Mellow Birds campaign that they did which was fantastic and very effective. This allowed to touch social media and get people talking.

This talk followed onto the role of technology in design and the way tweets made Foursquare communicate with the public. Everything you see now is already 10 years old. Things are being developed right now that I won't see until my thirties. I find this amazing although from experience knowing about aircraft engineering through my cousin I realise that everything is years and years behind that type of technology.

Sometime the solution is not always advertising. As was the case with a campaign by Burger King. This involved the King being spotted by paparazzi. It was clever and a whole new way of getting attention. People are even buying branding things to wear for their online icons. I find that unbelievable but some people are obviously sad enough to do it.

The talk by Andy was very inspiring and he spoke a lot of sense aswell as gaining the respect of the audience. I look forward to having a look at their work soon.