D&AD 2019: Diversity in Creativity
Creativity needs diversity
Agency: 72andSunny
Guest speaker: Rey Andrade (Deputy Executive Director - 72andSunny)
Image source: D&AD Live Blog
Rey shared his personal journey of being a creative – from El Paso to Amsterdam. Drawing from his experiences, he talked about how ensuring a multicultural workplace can be a potent boon to the creative environment. 'Collisions are really helpful in a creative process. You need to have these speedbumps and tensions, it wakens new parts of your brain, it means you keep thinking about the problem in a different way and don’t settle into something that feels familiar.' Diversity also ‘creates a nice vibrancy and momentum in the office and a dynamic feel to the work people are doing.'
In the recruitment process, 'it's easy to get attracted to people who are similar to you.' So it's important to remind ourselves when interviewing people, 'we need to look at the works they've done and how they speak to us'.
Why is this important? Well, when you foster creativity well enough in the workplace, excellent works come out of it. The AXE – Find Your Magic campaign is just one example.
A football Odyssey
Agencies: Equal Playing Field, LADbible Group
Guest speakers: Samantha Fay (Senior Vice President, Global Brand Strategy - Guinness World Records), Maggie Murphy (Director of Communications - Equal Playing Field), Peter Heneghan (Head of Communications - LADbible Group)
Sport is not the most diverse and gender-equal of industries. The guest panel ran a quiz, while a lot of people knew who the famous male football players were on the screen, not one person in the audience could name the female players shown.
Maggie shared a football World Record broken by the Equal Playing Field campaign – 30 (female) football players from 20 countries who climbed Mt Kilimanjaro to play the highest altitude football match ever played.
The guest panel further discussed how, while sport is thriving with a significant increase in media coverage and brand sponsorship globally, we remain incredibly far away from the women's game attaining a level playing field with the men's, and what needs to be done to change that trend.