D&AD’s local global enterprise

Late October 2006 and D&AD’s staff are in Singapore with an invited group of creative practitioners, students and tutors. The group is absorbed and fascinated. They know all about the D&AD Awards. In fact, they revere them. D&AD is the gold standard - tough, uncompromising and impossibly hard to win. Many of the group regularly refer to the Annuals but none of them has ever met anyone from D&AD.

As the directors talk encouragingly about D&AD’s Global Awards, the easy on-line entry system, the new international judging panels and D&AD’s remit as an educational charity, it dawns on the audience that D&AD exists for them just as much as for their peers in London, New York, Tokyo and Manchester. In fact D&AD needs them, and the many other creatives and students touched by its first 20 -creative city worldwide tour.

The ferocious pace of global and digital change has yielded a huge and newly accessible creative community to D&AD. In this joined up and converging world D&AD has opened its doors, slipped off the last vestiges of the justified criticism that it was too London-centric and welcomed these new international audiences. It recognises the part they must play in setting new global standards for this widening creative universe.

Last year’s Global Tour is just the latest chapter in a remarkable story about D&AD and Royal Mail that began in London in 2001.

A silent partner at Royal Mail

Six years ago, frustrated by suitable case study content, Royal Mail was looking for the right opportunity to show direct mail and integrated marketing actively creating success and profit for business. At about the same time, small, perfectly formed D&AD had so expanded its activities that a creaking business and marketing infrastructure was struggling to keep up.

An idea was born. Royal Mail would help D&AD introduce best practice to improve and integrate their marketing in exchange for the story – a D&AD case study with depth, longevity and more than a sprinkling of creativity. And so a great project began.

Improving data and integrating marketing practices have been fundamental to D&AD’s progress since then, but this is really the story of how, with Royal Mail’s help at the outset, D&AD has radically re-engineered its business over the last five years.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the capability D&AD now has to reach and talk to these new global audiences using digital, direct mail, telemarketing and face-to-face channels.

D&AD has developed the data infrastructure and agility to read its relationships with numerous audience groups locally and across the world. It can now build campaigns with the optimum combination of media and communications, tracking their effect and financial return in one continuous learning process.

Awarding expansion

The first big initiative generated by the Royal Mail project was moving the D&AD Awards entry system from paper to on-line in 2002. This has significantly improved the quality of incoming data, reduced costs and made the application process progressively easier for entrants. The system has been refined and developed a little more each year, increasing income levels by an average of 21% annually. At the same time, more effective marketing and communication programmes have reduced costs by between 5% and 10% a each year.

This year the D&AD Awards are a global programme marketed in 124 countries using a complex sector-based mix of press, posters, inserts, direct mail, e- and telemarketing. D&AD’s new international awareness shows. Communications have been produced in the principal European languages i.e. French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian plus Chinese, Japanese and almost half this year’s judges will travel to the UK from overseas. Early indications show unprecedented and promising levels of new international entrants, suggesting that contacts made on the Global Tour are translating into entries.

The Awards staff are also making a big contribution to D&AD’s international development. They still provide a support service for entrants but are no longer bogged down in the application process. Instead, they have become a useful and highly flexible telemarketing resource and, with the addition of foreign language speakers, are researching and building data for D&AD’s new overseas markets.

New old media

Direct mail plays an evolving and vital role at D&AD, perfectly complementing and underpinning the digital channel. As D&AD has repositioned as a not-for-profit global organisation, printed direct mail has become a valuable ambassador for carrying these important brand messages straight to the heart of its audience. Freed from delivering much of the detailed information now dealt with digitally, direct mail formats have become smaller but more creative and now have less environmental impact. Such is the prestige of the D&AD brand that for core programmes its audiences still want the experience of a piece of D&AD print in their hand.

Direct mail is now used more appropriately to build relationships and add the physical experience of print where it is most needed. D&AD membership has recently been restructured and promoted using simple but really imaginative direct mail. In the last 18 months membership levels have almost doubled, attendances at the President Lecture series have increased and the team has established its first regional D&AD network in the North West, again supported by highly innovative and keep-able 3D direct mail.

D&AD still uses direct mail in high volumes but has made the effort to develop stronger relationships with smaller, valuable groups like the often-neglected Creative Administrators. These people are unsung heroes whose unenviable task is submitting awards entries on behalf of their large agencies. Direct mail has played a particularly important part in giving recognition to this group and building a physical and emotional connection with them.

Direct mail volumes have increased across the organisation by more than 250% over the last three years due to increasing numbers of global contacts and it remains fundamental to D&AD’s Awards, Student Awards, Membership and Education communications.

Human resourcefulness

Best practice in anything depends on the willingness and skills of the people involved. D&AD is no exception. From the start of this project it recognised that people would be the most critical and challenging element in its success.

Chief Executive Michael Hockney set a new direction for D&AD when he arrived in 2003. His vision built on the principles of this best practice project, expanding its scope and accelerating the pace of change. Michael has introduced a new commercial awareness to the organisation that still sits comfortably with its not-for-profit status.

Some restructuring has taken place. Roles have been redefined and it’s significant that marketing and communications have joined data management, business intelligence and relationship development in the same directorate. Marketing, campaign management and data skills have increased throughout the organisation and more resources are now available for continuing professional development. People are actively encouraged to be entrepreneurial in the way they develop their roles, their projects and themselves.

With a strong HR function now in place, the organisation attracts and develops highly capable and dynamic individuals. Despite the enormous changes, D&AD hasn’t lost its character. A spirit of altruism and sense of pursuit of an ideal still runs through the organisation and people are as passionate about their own creativity as the members.

It’s now the beginning of 2007. A new D&AD Awards cycle with real global focus is in progress. Thanks to that early and ongoing support from Royal Mail, D&AD continues to recreate itself as a global business fit for creativity in the 21st century.

For more information about Best Practice in Integrated Marketing please contact Tim Lees at Royal Mail tim.lees@royalmail.com

Rachel Wood is a marketing and brand strategy consultant working with D&AD on this best practice project.