D&AD Shift is a free night school for creatives with no formal arts training, and it’s just celebrated its 10th anniversary. As part of the programme, students are given a range of lessons, receive mentoring and support, attend portfolio reviews and tackle three briefs for big-name brands. This year it was Amazon Ads, Uber Eats and Diageo, the latter of which was a live brief, the results of which are still under wraps.
I went to the class of 2025’s show recently, where I found out just how life-changing this programme is for the diverse bunch of young creatives who take part in it. It was also a great place to meet up-and-coming creatives, including those who will surely be creating some of the best adverts and rebrands of future years.
For Joe Seymour, a Shifter who specialises in graphic design and lettering, it’s the people who have made the experience. “Being part of such a passionate team has really lit a fire under me,” he said.
Ennie Fakoya, a strategist and copywriter, thinks that the “level of experimentation that Shift gives you is really important because you aren’t given a set role”.
“We just naturally found our strides,” she said, “which I think is really important because you are given not a playbook necessarily, but the playground for working in your own way and building your own capacity for creativity.”
Working on the briefs is a huge part of the programme, which both Joe and Ennie really enjoyed. “We really got on a level and dug in and came up with some crazy ideas and came up with a really exciting solution that we were all really happy with,” said Joe, talking about the Diageo brief. “It was really, really exciting.”
For Ennie, the Uber Eats brief, where teams were tasked with coming up with a campaign to revive the lunch hour for London workers, was her favourite, and one that her team won. “I think the reason that we won was because the idea was simple. It was based on a very human truth and the creative was simple. We cut out a quarter of a billboard and put the statistic on it [workers only get 16 minutes of lunch], and it was fully green, whereas the rest of it was just a regular colour. It was a physical manifestation of how little we care about lunch.”
Why do such big brands want to be a part of Shift?
“We’re proud to support D&AD’s mission of creating pathways for self-taught creatives – diverse voices and alternative routes into this industry benefit everyone,” said Roy Sharples, head of EU non-endemics, Amazon Ads Brand Innovation Lab.
“At its worst, if you haven’t got a diverse project team, the work suffers,” said Jeremy Lindley, global design director of Diageo. “And at its best, when you have a diverse project team, the work is better. because you build in more perspectives.
“So we’re really committed to progressive marketing overall, to diverse project teams and to D&AD Shift as a programme. Number one, because it’s the right thing to do, and number two, because it makes the work better.”
This year, there’s been an extra element of jeopardy on the Diageo brief. “The thought this year was, why don’t we give them a real brief?” said Jeremy. “So we’ve actually briefed them on a project that is live and it’s been briefed to our agencies. It’s made things much more real… There’s this kind of extra little bit of frisson there, ’cause the agencies are there, and we’re saying to them, ‘you see the quality of this work? You’ve got some serious competition to do something better than these guys.’ So it’s been absolutely fantastic.”
“The D&AD Shifters brought fresh energy and original thinking to their work with Brand Innovation Lab,” said Roy. “What stood out was their understanding of how advertisers can tap into the Amazon canvas to connect entertainment, community, and commerce in culturally relevant ways.”
I asked Joe and Ennie what they would say to someone thinking of applying for Shift. “Do it,” said Joe. “Because I was sat there looking at the application about to not hit send and going, ‘it’s going to be too competitive. I’m not gonna get in,’ but I did, and it’s been six months of just the most rewarding, lovely experiences, and it has broadened my horizons no end.”
Ennie emphasised that you don’t have to have ‘perfect’ projects to apply. “Whatever work you have done is important, even if it is spec work, even if it’s a drawing.”
“What they want to see is that you have an affinity for creating things and for making things and for learning how to do those things… If you have a want and a need to create, I think you should pursue Shift because it gives you the playground to do so.”
What’s next for Shift in the next 10 years? “I think Shift has had a material impact on our industry,” said Jeremy. “So I’m excited and hopeful that that material impact will grow, that we will end up with an industry that is more diverse, that’s more representative of the marketplace that we’re creating work for.”
Find out more about D&AD Shift
