Bob Isherwood, former worldwide creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi, was inducted into The One Club Creative Hall of Fame at a ceremony in New York on Thursday night.
Isherwood’s distinguished career is a triumph of many firsts. He won Australia’s first gold Lion for film and cinema at the Cannes International Advertising Festival (1985). he was the first Australian to win a D&AD Black Pencil (1976). He won D&AD’s first-ever Yellow pencil for Typography. He was given the first honorary Doctorate in Communications from RMIT (2007). He was appointed as the first active worldwide creative director in the industry. And he was the first and longest standing Dean at the Cannes Young Lion Academy (2012-2020).
Isherwood has received the Clio Lifetime Achievement Award and been inducted into the Clio & AWARD Halls of Fame. He has been named Australia’s Top Creative Director in the Australian Financial Review, and ranked in the top 10 art directors in the world by D&AD.
His advertising career spanned over three decades and three continents, including six years as a creative group head for Young & Rubicam London and 10 years with CDP before moving back to Australia in 1982 to become a founding partner of The Campaign Palace Sydney.
Isherwood joined Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney as joint creative director with Ron Mather in 1986, winning Campaign Brief Agency of the Year in 1988 and 1990. He spent 22 years at Saatchi & Saatchi, including 11 years as the agency’s worldwide creative director, and served as chair of its Worldwide Creative Board. Under his leadership, Saatchi & Saatchi’s global network of 143 offices in 83 countries consistently ranked among the top creative agencies in the world, winning more than 8,000 major awards – including becoming the #1 creative network at the 2002 Cannes Lions Festival – for clients such as P&G and Toyota, for whom Bob served as creative director for the global launch of Toyota Prius.
He also led the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase and with Richard Meyers, it grew to become the most anticipated premiere at the Cannes Lions Festival, featuring directors such as Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, Ellen von Unwerth, Kinka Usher, Floria Sigismondi, Mark Romanek, Michel Gondry, and Samuel Bayer.
He is most fiercely proud of using his time and talent to uplift those around him. Some of the industry’s most successful global creative talent –David Droga, Tony Granger, Pablo del Campo, Malcolm Poynton, Ben Nott, David Nobay, Leo Premutico, Icaro Doria, Menno Kluin, Steve Jackson, and others – are a testament to the calibre of creative talent that flourished under his mentorship.
Coming from a difficult childhood, against all odds (and the admission rules), Isherwood was given a place at RMIT to study Advertising Art, thanks to the intervention of Victor Greenhalgh. Because this changed the direction of his life, Isherwood later established a scholarship program for underprivileged students at RMIT, that has been granted for the past 19 years and is funded in perpetuity. In 2006, AWARD renamed its longstanding Encouragement Award to the Bob Isherwood Encouragement Award.
He believes passionately in the power of ideas to change the world and served as the driving force behind the Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World-Changing Ideas. The Award attracted judges as distinguished as Buzz Aldrin, Edward de Bono, David Byrne, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, Baz Luhrmann, John Maeda, Lou Reed and others. Life Straw, Quantum Tunneling Composites, Concrete Canvas, Light Up The World Foundation, Frozen Ark, Plantic, Ji Li’s 3-D Alphabet, Wikipedia and Jot a Dot are among the awarded ideas that are still making an impact on the world today.
In 2010, Isherwood left agency life to educate the next generation of advertising talent by creating and teaching Creative Advertising at Vanderbilt University and in 2014 was honoured with the Harriet Gillman Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also co-founded Dialog Health in 2011, a two-way mobile messaging company created to improve patient satisfaction, compliance, and adherence in healthcare.
Isherwood joined The One Club for Creativity in 2020 as the director of creative development to continue to nurture and identify creative talent in the industry and co-founded ONE School with Oriel-Davis Lyons during the height of the George Floyd protests.
The One Club asked industry vets to share stories about Bob here.
