More Blacks, More Irish at this year’s D&AD Festival

So last month I did a presentation at the D&AD Festival 2024 about how the Creative Ladder is a tool that can be used by teams of all sizes to make creativity more predictable, repeatable and scaleable. A selection of my slides is below.

I created a bespoke Ladder just for the session based on a mixture of the versions used by Heineken, Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo. And then we used it to score a selection of good/bad/ugly advertising.

Two Things that surprised me:

1. Not everyone hates that Apple ad with the big SATANIC metal press squeezing the LIFE out of humanity’s creative cultural history (can you guess which side of the debate I am on?)

2. Some people STILL don’t know that creative quality is the biggest controllable factor in driving advertising profitability (I used accelero group’s updated study from 2023 - slide below). Come on everyone! In the midst of the debates about programmatic, AI, performance vs brand etc we need to remember that the creative execution IN the frame remains at least as important as where that frame appears.


(Pic taken by my great 21CB colleague Anna Bedineishvili, T-shirt model’s own)