The newly elected trustees are Caitlin Ryan, former Group ECD of Karmarama, Nicky Bullard Creative Director of LIDA and Hamish Gardner, the New Blood trustee. The Board of Trustees represents the full breadth of the advertising, design and digital industries. As a member-run organisation, the elected board is responsible for the overall direction of D&AD, its programmes and where its money is spent. Each elected trustee serves a term of three years and New Blood trustees serve for a year.
Sandoz is bringing the future - he is not just a disruptive creative partner with big ideas, he's a sci-fi traveller stuck in the wrong time, working very hard to help us all catch up. His manifesto is not about what he can do in a year; he wants us to think of the next 20 years and how we can use creativity to save ourselves.
He declares that the internet is the reason he got into advertising and names Tim Berners-Lee as the person who has most (indirectly at least) influenced his career to date. A voracious reader of sci-fi novels, he embraces the idea of the future and all of its exciting innovations and worries about those that bury their heads in the sand, unwilling to change with the times. For Sandoz, creativity is what is going to save the world, which is good, because we are good at creativity.
He explains why we should all take the red pill. "The next 20 years will be a golden age, in which we envision, design and deliver a new world. With good reason, as right now this one we have needs us. We have to design a new way to live on earth, create new ways to live with each other and work out how we are going to live with technology.
"Fortunately we humans are already sophisticated problem solving machines, able to start with just an idea and the belief that it can be done. Rather than fighting against the machines, as we see in the movies, we actually have technology on our side. Understanding how science and technology works makes you think about what is possible. Asking yourself, 'can this work?' It makes you experiment and to me that is the essence of creativity. To every day, explore what is possible."
"The future is anyone's guess, so why can't it be yours? Invest in technology. Invest in creativity. In this D&AD is your rock and your light. We are a not-for-profit platform for creativity, giving directly to initiatives that drive our industry forward. Our Pencils do not just award excellence, create confidence and make careers - they show us all the way forward. Our education initiatives take the knowledge from the Pencil winners and turn it into wisdom we can all share and learn from.
"We create catalysts such as the White Pencil, awarding work for good, to encourage answers our industry and our world needs to see. We ask brands to take the responsible seat at the table. Our New Blood education program accelerates the next generation and promotes diversity helping us stay fresh and grow. If the answer to our problems is creativity, and I believe that it is, then D&AD is a vital platform to help us achieve our goals. Become a member of D&AD and you become a member of your own future, enter your work into D&AD and you enter your work into your everyone's future, win at D&AD and you boost everyone's future times ten.
"I look forward to a future filled with creative thinking, where our work has a meaningful impact on the world around us. Over time, I expect D&AD to give out exponentially more Pencils, thousands more. Not because our benchmark of quality is getting lower - we won't drop our standard - but thanks to technology, we are about to get better," concludes Sandoz.
