Adobe Presents: D&AD – In Conversation with Debbi Vandeven / Experiential | Adobe UK

Hi, I'm Debbi Vandeven and I was the jury president for experiential for D&AD, and I work at VMLY&R and I'm located in the United States.

I remember years ago when I was much younger hearing about D&AD and so many people wanting to have a pencil. As I got more experienced in my career, I learned a lot more about it and how important it was for creative excellence at D&AD, not just the craft of the work but the idea and how inspiring the work is. So for us, at my company specifically, it's one of the highest pieces of creative reputation that we can get.

Yes, so that's what was difficult. The tough year that we're having in the industry, it was a decision a lot of the agencies had made overall, which was cutting awards. But the only reason any agency would cut awards was to save jobs. So it remained extremely important as celebrating creative work, pushing each other. I think as an industry we've been very good at pushing each other to do better work each year, come up with things that haven't been done before. So I don't think it's changed for the creative community at all. Actually, the community as a whole, I know our CEO is very much behind the award shows. For us, we actually get better clients when we do win awards. So we don't look at it as just look at what we've done; we look at it as a piece of recognition in the industry that you can do really great work that has a return on investment for clients.

So experiential, I want to preface this by saying this year we started off just talking about the fact that some of the things that happen in experiential, like bringing very large crowds together, things in experiential are sometimes actually tactical, like where you touch screens right after another person had just touched a screen. There were a lot of things that you couldn't put your mind aside on, just because of the situation that we're all in and not knowing what next year will bring. We all looked at the situations that we might not see some work like this for a while. You might not see a piece of work that has a lot of people in one place. So keeping that in mind, when we looked at the actual awards, we were looking for things that we always start with: what makes you jealous? If you really wish you had done that piece of work, that's an easy way to think about it. I know some topics came up as we went into the work a little bit. Some topics came up about pieces done for just awareness and not having an outcome. It wasn't so much that we were talking about effectiveness of everything, but just if you're going to do a piece of work, especially in public service type work, we'd like to see more that it actually makes changes, rather than just doing a piece to let people know about a problem. I think to be honest, our news already lets you know enough. You can get the problem, but it's how are we going to solve it? I think that was a really interesting topic. But we were looking for work that obviously it was D&AD standard, something that was inspiring to us, that we would be jealous of, the work itself that it was very well crafted.

Right, because a lot of times with craft you're thinking about a piece of film and is it very well crafted, or a piece of print, was the illustration amazing. So you're looking for that, but in experiential, I think for us it even came down to if something was social, is it more than putting a post out? Did the craft of what they do was it much better? We had a great discussion about the Game of Thrones piece and we loved it. It was a great piece of work. I got into a very interesting part about craft because it was so beautifully crafted, the gravestones that were definitely sculpted. But I thought it was funny because one of the jury members said, 'You know, this would win my highest award if they'd done it out of stone.' That's the kind of craft you can't even get to. It is funny because no matter what, you want to do a piece that everyone's jealous of the craft. I was thinking through just some of the other pieces of work. There's a nice piece with Blade, and there was a great discussion about that piece of work. It was such a smart idea to actually do a product placement inside the packaging, inside the boxes at your ordering, so you can smell the glee. But the subject turned into: was it good for the world? That plastic, we're not solving the problem with plastic in the world, we're just adding to it. So although the product placement was brilliant, I think it kept it from going higher in judging because of things like that. Nothing's perfect when we start looking at the work. But I think we really talked about things that were great for the client, great for the world, great for the consumer. Overall in experiential, there was a discussion between Amazon and Walmart. Amazon has a position of trying to do the very best for the consumer, always thinking about what the consumer will think about. I'm nothing against Walmart, but when Walmart looks at it, I do think it's very highly on you're going to get a good product at a good price, so it was much more product focused. That piece ran in Walmart, which actually made more sense based on those two audiences. But in the end, it came down to the fact that we don't want to add more plastic to the world or encourage it, so that's the reason it probably didn't go as high as it might have otherwise.

Yeah, so judging this year, I definitely was a bit nervous about the process. I've been president of several other juries and I'm really comfortable with online judging, spending the time going through the work, making notes. But you're used to the discussion in a room, so I was a little bit nervous about it. But honestly, the jury I had was fantastic. They were on time, they stayed engaged in the conversation. Everyone definitely spoke, you could get comments out of them, and really good discussion. Just like everyone's getting so used to the Zoom calls, I have five different types of video conferencing stuff at home now. So I just know that the process still went well. I just, no matter what, we're going to miss being in a room together. I think more as a jury, it's because I've met some really fantastic people in the industry in juries, and building the relationships and that community isn't quite the same if you're never going to be in the same room. So that would be the only part. Other than that, I felt like our jury did really good discussing it. I didn't see it drop off. You didn't have anyone afraid to speak or not getting enough time. There were no arguments over work, there was debate, different people thought about work, but no arguments at all.

Okay, I'll say this. There's a piece of work that stood out. I think it was one of our yellow pencil winners, and I think it ended up a yellow pencil winner because we needed more context to the work. It was for Stevenage challenge, which was the BK work. I'll admit I'm not soccer or football, I'm not well versed in the subject. So when we were all talking about that, the team, some of them being from London and other areas in Europe, they definitely could bring more to the table on how the game worked. If you're a gamer, you know more about that. I personally love the work, and the more I watched the case and understood about it... My agency did the work for Wendy's for Fortnite, and it is a type of game hack, actually sponsoring the game, which is exactly what happened here. They sponsored the team Stevenage with the shirts in real life, which got them in the game in a very different way. So it was an ingenious sponsorship overall. I gave it props for all of that, the thought process of the team to figure out how to make BK part of the game without just putting a big sponsor on the game.

Well, there is... We definitely had lots of great work in our short list in general, it was really nice. One piece that was very funny was Uber Eats. That piece is just something that no matter what puts a smile on your face. They have a shark vehicle that drives around the city, and they put the fish sandwich in front of it, they made another car so it looks like the shark is eating the sandwich. It's simple brilliant work that's going to make people laugh. So there's stuff like that that was nice. I think something that did well this year was projects that had some levity to it, projects that made us smile. Things that had really heavy subjects were actually harder for us, and things that made you laugh or smile tended to do better in this jury. So the other piece that I'm going to throw out that is wonderful and did well, everyone loved it, there wasn't any jury member that even had a discussion about it, it rose to the top immediately, and it's another yellow pencil. It's the Punishing Signal. If you haven't seen that work, it was an immediate for everyone. I loved seeing that it was from India and it was so relevant around the world. That's what struck everyone. The Punishing Signal worked with Mumbai police. Everyone knows what it's like to sit at a light and have everyone honking. I thought about it a lot in New York. The team from London, people from all over, it actually just raises your anxiety at lights when everyone is laying on the horn. So what they did is it counted down, if the decibels were too high, it gave you more time. So the smartest punishment: if you're going to have to sit longer, people would finally quit honking in order for their line of traffic to go. All of us thought that experience was better for everyone. It just moved up a lot in judging straight up to the yellow without anyone saying it shouldn't be there. Hands down it was a great piece of work.

There were some trends in technology. I think we started seeing that over the last couple years. But when I say technology, a lot of times the technology is more transparent, it's made the work better but it's not the idea itself. So a piece like Street Vet that was Purina from Nestle, that piece if we can actually help diagnose anything wrong with your dog, it's tapping into a normal animal behavior and doing something great for the world. I do have to recommend that piece. Also for me, the case itself is always very important when you're judging work like this because you don't have a lot to go off of. The case study tells the story. The way they talked about the technology in that case was very simple, you understood how it was used, and it wasn't about the technology, it just enabled the idea. So I think there's been a few of those kinds of trends throughout the work. Then another yellow pencil for us actually used what I would consider creative e-commerce, and it was the Nike Air Max piece. It was definitely culturally contextual because it was for sale and they had painted over the graffiti. I've seen cases around that as well. What I loved about it is the way that they seamlessly integrated the product with the Air Max being on the characters in graffiti and then making it into e-commerce with your location. I think you're going to see more and more of that type of technology being used, a store being anywhere, you being able to buy something which is very dangerous for a lot of us. But the great thing about that one is it was part of street culture to begin with, so it fit in so many different ways. That piece of work was fantastic and moved to the top. So I would definitely say overall, the team that judged it felt like trends in that area. Those were sort of the main things: work that was brilliantly done and executed. I think the categories that I saw having the toughest time are again at conventions like CES type entries. Things like that are still not moving to the top. Maybe it's because they're so overwhelming to begin with, the idea itself isn't so simple. I can't quite tell what's causing them, but a lot of that work in experiential has not moved to the top. In different areas, there was some really great purpose-driven work. For Lily Oncology, it was actually the Get Up alarm clock. I don't know if you've seen that piece. We had a great discussion on this piece. For oncology patients, they use social in a very good way. What happens is the alarm clock in the morning shines a light on your ceiling and it's posts and videos of friends and families supporting people for anyone who has cancer, messages about how important it is they get up and take on the world. It was really inspirational and it was still using technology in a new way. What made that piece stand out was that social can also be used for bad, we all know, but this was a very positive social message. So that piece of work also did well. I think those are the kind of things that resolved different kinds of experiences. We actually saw a lot of online experiences. The BK burn ad that a lot of people know, that one did very well in this jury as well. It was using behavior that fought against your competition in the ads to burn the ad, and it was an AR piece but it's fun, it was also outdoor, so the experience was more enhanced. It wasn't just looking at an outdoor board, you were more engaged in the work. So there were some trends around stuff like that too.

I think we were all wondering the same thing. I think our advice was even to D&AD about this category: we believe that you're going to have a lot more in online areas next year because we were forced to do so much more online over these months. Instead of doing a lot of street type events or experiential work like I mentioned before, there was a beautiful piece that was about windows, shopping windows, and people interacting with the shopping window on a street. There's probably less of that that will happen in the next round of juries. But I think you're going to have a lot more online stuff happening, experiences through social, definitely some in technology. I think we definitely gave them some advice to consider broadening their social area out a little bit in online categories, just because you also have a very large piece of public service messaging and stuff happening right now in the world. I don't know if they'll want to divide out anything with COVID or anything with Black Lives Matter, if they'll divide anything out or put everything together. But those experiences that we're seeing, you're going to definitely see work around that area going into the 2021 jury.

I have to start with this. I've been in the industry for 25 plus years. When I got into the industry, it's so strange because I did have advantages. I happened to know what an agency was even from the time I was in high school, based on friends of the family. I knew what an agency was, I knew I wanted creative, I went to school for creative, knowing that I always wanted to be a creative director. I knew that from a very young age. So I think that's our responsibility for the next generation: to ensure diversity that we're not looking at, that don't think about this industry as a career because when you don't see it, you can't become it. So I think that's our responsibility, and I think D&AD plays a very large role in that. Then just speaking about my own experience, which is where I feel I can say something relevant, and it's very hard for me to relate to other issues and I know that, so I don't try. But I can do this. There were many times in my career I was the only female in the room. Being in that position, you have a fear of failure, mostly because you're very concerned about the generation behind you. If you fail, what will that do to the next generation of women in the industry? So I learned over time that I definitely had the right to be there and to voice my opinion, not be afraid of saying. I remember a long time ago a situation in judging that was over a Huggies commercial. Most of the men in the room didn't even buy diapers, they didn't realize the context to the commercial. It's not that they didn't like it, they just didn't have relevance for the project itself. I think what's very important now is as we get more diversity in these jury rooms, that people feel free to speak about everything that they bring to the table. You bring your own life to the table. So I just really hope that that happens much more and at a much faster rate than I think we've been blinded to for the last several years.