Abstract Engine

Andy Sandoz is a partner at Deloitte Consulting LLP and the Global Chief Creative Officer of Deloitte Digital. He focuses on how ideas change business. Here, he recalls his 2015-16 presidential year, and traces the introduction of the White Pencil to his own ‘tech for good’ mantra and beyond.

I had been working with D&AD for over a decade as guest speaker, juror, trustee, management, and then president in 2016, and then not.

D&AD is a journey, a creative, shared and constantly changing one. One in which, if fortunate like me, you get to be president before it moves on. (It’s really fun to be president by the way, thank you.)

To the group at D&AD, I represented digital creativity – ideas and technology. But not only. Of the many things we did over the years, one I’m most proud of being part of is launching the White Pencil in 2010.

The White Pencil, and Impact Awards that followed, were an early foray into purpose and positive business, and also challenged the nature of an award to be more influential before the creative act, not just rewarding after

And so accordingly, come 2016, I set out my presidential year around ‘tech for good’. “Breathe in technology, breathe out creativity,” I headlined in Campaign. “We have to design a new way to live on Earth,” I wrote on studio windows. “This is the brief of our lives,” I power-pointed around the world.

It’s worth noting that I had a lucky year. Work done before set me up soundly, commercially we were solid and had choices, and things were much more predictable and stable then than they were for subsequent presidents, or are now.

Still, I recall, I wasn’t sure about my digital purpose focus. It was the natural place for my energy to flow, but I remember a sense of missing something. Also, it was clear to me that this was more than just the year ahead, I wrote it at the time as a twenty-year vision, allowing for change.

I wasn’t wrong. Six years on and I’m not now. Creativity, technology, purpose and business transformation are all powerfully connected today, as brands face new problems, disruptive technology and cultural-political-pandemic shifts and the urgent climate crisis.

And the pencil winners that year lived up to this technology and purpose perspective. Great ideas and winners, then and now, including What Three Words remapping the planet, the celebrating and selling of imperfect vegetables, beer turned into biofuel, a magazine printed with HIV+ blood, tackling gun crime from supermarkets, and moms taking on the role of security guards at soccer matches.

But a year is a long time as president and what you set out to be, like anything I suppose, isn’t always what happens or what you become. The year changed and changed me. Throughout, I thought hard about the value of awards themselves, concerned about the purpose of the work we were doing and what it meant to win a pencil.

I enjoyed the energy of the student awards, New Blood, most. The clear meaning, sense of achievement and happiness – everyone connected was just lighter, freer. An uplifting lesson to us all. I was most proud of Shift, which we launched to bring more diversity into the industry. To hang out and discuss the future and be inspired by D&AD Shifters was an invitation to new ideas and thinking, a privilege.

And the festival: days of education and entertainment, trying to remember everyone’s names whilst failing at being a host/presenter and being so busy and physically stretched that Paul Smith (he expressly told me not to call him Sir) gave me a shoulder massage before going on stage. It felt like a music festival for creative learning.

These are the parts that made up that year, and stay with me now. The parts that led me to adapt my story on the way, as I found the bit I had missed at the start. Whilst the trend to purpose, as a consequence of technology, was foundational, there was also another emerging element that came forward – diversity and inclusion.

If you can win a pencil, which is a challenge indeed as it means you have used creativity to do something remarkable, then you can teach someone else to win a pencil. And thereby the entire creative industry improves, as does the impact of the work we do, and we all win. If you can win one, you can teach one.

This was the thinking that mattered. And not just within my year, it went back to previous presidents and work around the virtuous circle between professional and student awards, and decades of commitment from D&AD to connect professional and student bodies. And it went forward. To me this simply captured the wider purpose of an award, and an organisation focused on the pursuit of creative excellence for all. It brought everyone together in celebration of creativity now, and by opening it up to others inside and outside of the industry, for the future.

‘Win One, Teach One’ became the story of my year. A simple big idea that strengthened the initiative to get those who won to share how. And in the end it shaped the final elements and packaging of what happened. Creating a manual not an annual. A book to stand on top of, not to look up to. With a curriculum inside built from the winners. A platform to learn how to achieve excellence in creativity from those that had directly done just that.

Ideas are slippery. Fluid. Where they begin, and who begins them, is not where they end or who owns them in the end... if they end. During my year I helped shape a loose idea that had been around in the organisation, well, forever, into ‘Win One, Teach One’ and it took me most of the year to do it. Romantically, magical reality-ly, and with hindsight, I felt it was there waiting at the start, I just hadn’t got to it yet. 

You might think you get to be president for what you know, I think I got to be president for what I could learn. I learned more about leadership, about the pursuit of excellence, the value of celebration, aspiration and reward. And more about ideas. Being D&AD president improved me, I hope in return I improved it too. 

To the wonderful, talented and committed team who keep D&AD running and growing year after year it was such a pleasure to work with you. When I look back I hope I did my part for them, did the role in a way that they all deserved.

I hope I helped make D&AD more purposeful and more useful. That I added some value to awards, to creativity and the pursuit of excellence. Strengthening the long standing connections with education and leaning into emerging trends like purpose and inclusion. 

Whether ‘Win One, Teach One’ holds explicitly today or not, I like to think its essence remains and builds as it always did. The digital annual captures the stories of those who did the work. The Shift program is now in London, New York, Sydney, Berlin/Hamburg and Sao Paulo. The current president, Rebecca Wright, is the first to come from the world of education.

I hope in 2016, I helped create more meaning and value into the pencil, that lasts and lives on to the next and the next. Really, who knows. Maybe. But I do know that I had a lot of fun whilst doing it and most of all I hope everyone I got to do it with did too. Thanks again D&AD.