Creative Impact Accelerator | D&AD Festival 2026

Full session details coming soon

Paul Drake, Foundation Director, D&AD

You don't have the budget to be boring. Our research shows the biggest opportunities come when organisations take bold, transformational creative leaps. But how do you embrace risk without losing control, focus, or alignment? This session explores how to harness human truth, emotional impact, and shared ambition to create work that cuts through, gets noticed, and makes an impact.

Orlando Wood - Chief Creative Officer, System 1

Katie Evans - Chief Marketing Officer, Burger King

Tanja Grubner - Global Brand Director, Essity

Moderated by Charlotte Williams - Co-Founder, The Thought Partnership

Strong relationships are one of the biggest drivers of creative impact. This interactive session focuses on how to build trust fast, communicate clearly, and manage complex stakeholder dynamics. You’ll learn practical frameworks to strengthen collaboration and enable teams to take bigger creative risks.

Speakers to be announced soon.

Great creative ideas are only as strong as the environment that allows them to flourish. While lofty statements about creativity inspire, it’s the practical systems, structures, and processes that consistently deliver outstanding work. This session explores how brands can create or deliver repeatable, scalable environments for creativity, ensuring high-quality outputs across briefs, teams, and campaigns.

David Lee - Chief Brand & Creative Officer, Squarespace

Karen Blackett CBE

Luiza Baffa - Global Director of Creative Studio, On

Priya Matadeen - Brand Director, Mulberry

Moderated by David Patton - CEO, D&AD

The session concludes by connecting the key insights from today with the wider Creative Impact Accelerator programme, outlining how organisations can move from understanding the conditions for creativity to actively building them within their teams, processes and culture.