PJ Pereira, Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell and Jury President of Entertainment for the D&AD Awards, reviews the year’s best storytelling, from fiction films to immersive experiences, shares insights from D&AD judging and reveals branded content trends to inspire your creativity.

Pereira insisted on leaving definitions outside the judging process when it came to creating strict rules about branded content. “Being a new category in a fast moving world like ours at a stage when the world is changing faster than ever it’s tempting to jump quickly to try and to define and establish the rules, and I think that can lead to the wrong approach,” he says.

Mentioning Silence the Critics by Mother for IKEA, he highlights that this is a category that is restricted by definition. Pereira brings this ad into the Entertainment category as it is so compelling that he would pay on-demand to watch it. “It drinks from music and from entertainment a lot and in the end when you’re watching thousands of things that feels like a piece of entertainment,” he says. “For me branded entertainment is a great use of client money and the consumers’ time.”

When pressed about trends Pereira reveals he thinks they are to be avoided and that juries should be ahead of the curve. “The responsibility that we have of learning on behalf of the industry is the ability to spot the work that is so good it may spark a trend,” he says. He adds that this doesn’t lie in the hands of creatives but with the audience and the brands who at the moment are reacting to unprecedented times.

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