D&AD is challenging creatives to rediscover their fire and reverse the pessimism weighing down the industry.
The rallying cry comes as Uncommon Creative Studio unveils a provocative new campaign for D&AD, which blames practitioners for the creative world’s struggles.
The 90-second campaign film, which launches today, begins, “Creativity is dead. It wasn’t AI. It wasn’t social media. It wasn’t short-form. It was you.”
The film goes on to implicate, “every person who wrote thought pieces instead of thinking, who scrolled instead of doing” along with, “every critic, every passenger, every excuse, every person who said, ‘What can I do’?”
But it becomes a call-to-arms, for people to revive creativity by caring enough “to make something more than noise.”
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Uncommon co-founder Nils Leonard, who is also a D&AD trustee, believes it’s time creatives stopped pointing the finger at external forces squeezing the creative industry, and started taking more responsibility.
“Creativity dies every time we spend more time wanging on social, and every time we start believing our jobs are content solutions,” he says. “Shut up and make.”
The problem, he believes, is that creativity has, “lost all its power, in both boardrooms and in the agencies themselves.” This stemmed from the industry, “losing sight of what it was selling,” and giving away its confidence, “in a race to be the fastest, the cheapest, the most accommodating.”
The work has suffered, he believes, “because the ferocity behind it has been blunted.”
“The pandemic of our industry – cynicism – has crept in. This renders any act of wild hope and truly original thinking as folly, too hard, and not on brief.
“We have forgotten to be disruptive and provocative but worse than that we have been rendered passengers – commenting from the sidelines and spending our hours penning LinkedIn doom essays.”
The campaign, and in particular the manifesto shared in the film, is designed to help creatives remember “who they are.”
“The centre, the value, the leap. The critical organ without which no blood will pump. At the very least I hope the work is a mirror of what we could be,” Leonard says.
“We have been hypnotised to believe that the most unbreakable human element, creativity, is coughing its last breath. What if it’s just clearing its throat?”
Lisa Smith, the D&AD President who also works with Leonard as Uncommon’s global chief design officer, echoed his call to action.
“This manifesto is a reminder to the industry that ideas are only as powerful as the people brave enough to make them real,” she explains.
“As creative leaders, we have a responsibility to protect that spirit – to keep making, experimenting and proving that bold, human ideas still matter. D&AD exists to champion that pulse. To show that creativity isn’t just alive – it’s vital.”
To coincide with the campaign, D&AD also launched a microsite featuring a series of articles unpacking the current state of creativity.
A growing fightback
Interestingly, the spirit of the campaign seems to be building on a groundswell of similar sentiments.
At the weekend, Marko Pfann published a broadside which touched on the same themes. The designer and co-founder of the Paradiso festival also called on creatives to snap out of the slow doomed walk into oblivion.
“There’s a lack of self-respect. A lack of standards. A lack of originality,” he wrote. “We stopped inventing. We stopped exploring. We stopped risking. We started referencing. We started repeating. We started pleasing.”
Too much work has started to look and feel the same, he warned, and so projects feel, “safe, predictable, painfully familiar.”
Like Leonard, Pfann thinks the industry has become a straitjacket, training creatives “to stay inside the lines” in the interests of efficiency.
Creatives, he believes, “are undervalued because you’ve undervalued yourself.”
“You optimised yourself into irrelevance. You replaced your instincts with formulas. You traded expression for business advice that never understood you.”
And like Leonard, he believes creatives have the power – and the responsibility – to turn the tide. Pfann thinks individuals must embrace what they do best and re-discover their sense of purpose.
“Take the risk of being yourself,” Pfann writes. “Create from your truth. Have a perspective. Say the thing you actually think. Stop treating yourself like a cookie cutter in a world drowning in templates… Originality comes from inside, not from a Pinterest board.”
And another design leader – Ragged Edge co-founder Max Ottignon – recently called on creatives to fight back at the Upscale conference in Málaga.
“We need to come together as an industry,” he told the audience, as quoted by Creative Boom.
“We need to fight for time, we need to fight for thinking, we need to fight for quality, we need to fight for experimentation, we need to fight for craft, and fundamentally, we have to fight for difference. We have to fight for difference, and I think if difference wins, we as a group, as a creative industry, we all win.”
He also echoed one of Leonard’s beliefs, using almost the exact same words – “We are in a fight, but it isn’t against AI, it’s against apathy,” Ottignon said.
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