One Club 2017 Creative Hall of Fame ceremony. Image supplied.

The 2017 Creative Hall of Fame inductees are Tom Burrell, founder of Burrell Communications; Diane Cook-Tench, founding director of the VCU Brandcenter (inducted into Educators Hall of Fame); Susan Hoffman, co-CCO at Wieden+Kennedy; David Lubars, CCO, BBDO Worldwide, CCO and chairman, BBDO North America; and artist/designer Rebeca Méndez, professor at UCLA, Design Media Arts.

“The Creative Hall of Fame is the ultimate recognition of a storied career, as a creative professional, and our newest inductees are being honoured because of their significant impacts on the advertising and design industries,” said Kevin Swanepoel, CEO of The One Club for Creativity. “These are creatives whose work has transcended advertising, influencing pop culture, uplifting African-American culture, laying the groundwork for the next generation of creatives and even having an impact on thought and action on climate change. They are titans of our industry.”

Inductee background

• Tom Burrell launched what is now Burrell Communications in 1971. By understanding and highlighting the positive aspects of black American culture, Burrell changed the face of American advertising. A collection of Burrell’s advertisements for Coca-Cola is archived at the Library of Congress for its cultural and historical significance.
• Diane Cook-Tench is the founding director of VCU Brandcenter, the graduate program of Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU Brandcenter today boasts a league of alumni that lead major brand work across the world. Prior to her academic career, she won more than 100 awards for her creative work while at The Martin Agency.
• Susan Hoffman, Wieden+Kennedy’s “employee #8”, has spent more than three decades at the agency and is responsible for some of its most memorable work for Nike and others. She opened W+K London and W+K Amsterdam, and has intermittently served as executive creative director for the Portland, New York and Delhi offices. As co-chief creative officer, Hoffman currently oversees the entire global network.
• David Lubars is chief creative officer, BBDO Worldwide, CCO and chairman, BBDO North America. In the 13 years since he joined BBDO, Lubars has helped transform the agency into the most creatively awarded in the world and a recipient of more than 15 Agency of the Year recognitions by various industry publications. His work for BMW Films changed forever how we once thought of as advertising, and he was named one of the top 10 creative directors of all time in a recent Forbes CMO Network article.
• Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer and professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, where she is director of the CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio dedicated to using art and design to develop creative collaborations, new fields of study and methods to research, create, and execute projects around the social and ecological impacts of climate change.