D&AD Festival returned to London's Southbank Centre this year, bringing together leading voices across advertising, design and culture.
Across two very different sessions, the same message kept surfacing. Creativity isn’t disappearing; it’s being tested. And the foundations that make creative work great haven’t changed at all.
What is advertising?
The morning kicked off with Orlando Wood from System1, who has spent years researching what makes advertising effective.
To get the talk started, he played The Guinness 'Surfer' ad from 1999. The minute the music started, it all came flooding back. If you don’t recall this masterpiece of an advert, the black-and-white film depicts surfers scaling gigantic waves as white horses emerge from the sea - a nod to ‘Neptune's Horses’ by Walter Crane.
Hailed as the best ad of all time by Channel 4, ITV and The Independent, the film symbolises the patient pursuit of a cold pint of Guinness, much like waiting for the perfect wave. Combine cinematic visuals with an epic soundtrack and a tagline as memorable as ‘Good Things Come To Those Who Wait’, and you've got an ad that stays with you for a lifetime.
That clip had everyone in the room locked in.
This brought up the simple question of 'What is advertising?' Orlando’s answer wasn’t about targeting, algorithms or performance metrics. Instead, he broke advertising down into seven simple ideas:
Truth, beauty, experience, possibility, story, drama and feeling.
Each point above was illustrated with ads that have stood the test of time. Throughout his talk, he framed advertising as art, drawing on the likes of Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy.
It reinforced something that’s easy to forget in a world obsessed with optimisation. The most impactful ads aren’t always the ones that drove the most sales or generated the most clicks. It’s those that made people feel something.
One quote Orlando shared stood out to me. Susan Sontag wrote in 1964:
‘What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’.
Why creativity needs trust
Who knew a hostage negotiation had so much to teach us about creativity?
For the second talk of the day, former police hostage negotiator, Chula Rupasinha, explored how trust is built through credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation.
One of the most memorable moments was a live demonstration of active listening with volunteers on stage. It highlighted just how difficult it is to listen rather than wait for your turn to speak. It's a habit most of us fall into without even realising.
At first, it didn't seem like the kind of session you'd expect at a creative event. But as the discussion unfolded, it became obvious that great creative work relies on trust.
Clients need to trust agencies, agencies need to trust clients and teams need to trust each other. For an idea to grow legs, there needs to be a safe space where people feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. Without that, even the best creative ideas can struggle to take off.
Why AI is not the enemy
After lunch, the focus shifted to AI. Rodrigo Sobral, Global Chief Creative Officer at OLIVER, walked us through how his team used generative AI to produce a cinematic Super Bowl ad for NetApp in just three weeks.
But the bit that stuck with me wasn't the speed, it was how they got there. For weeks, the team mulled over moodboards and storyboards to create a clear creative direction before using AI to bring the idea to life.
Rodrigo was also honest about the limitations of the technology too. AI made mistakes, and it was the human eye that caught them, corrected them and helped shape the final piece. This felt important to hear, especially when there’s so much noise around the idea that ‘AI is coming for our design jobs’.
The wider session did explore some of the harder questions around AI and creativity. In the upcoming D&AD AI and Creativity Report, 63% of respondents disagreed that AI produces original work independently.
There was also a conversation around what happens when the creative process moves too quickly. If AI can take you from brief to finished output in minutes, where does the learning happen? The wrong answers, the scrapped ideas, the three versions that weren’t quite right. That's where the craft develops. Skipping that process entirely comes at a cost.
The takeaway I’m leaving with is that AI isn’t a shortcut for ideas. Sure, it can help you get there faster, but the thinking behind the work still has to come from you.
This talk was quietly reassuring. At Pretty Pragmatic, we're already having these conversations about where AI adds value and where it doesn’t.
In an industry moving this fast, the best thing we can do is stay curious and make sure we're the ones doing the creative steering.
Is creativity dead or alive?
After a full day of talks, discussions and debates, my answer would be a definitive no. If anything, AI is opening up more ways to be creative.
Yes, the tools are changing at an incredible pace, which can help with repetitive tasks and speed up parts of the process. But we still need to keep people at the heart of everything we do, whether that’s designing a user experience or thinking about the feeling someone gets when they open a physical booklet we’ve designed.
Because ultimately, people still connect with the same things they always have: lived experiences, emotion, trust and original thinking.