D&AD is a charity. It uses the money that comes in to educate the next generation. Meanwhile, it stimulates, celebrates and enables excellence in commercial creativity with its awards, festivals and learning programs. Like many thousands of other businesses around the world, its revenues dramatically reduced during the pandemic. Businesses like D&AD’s, which are in part events companies, were badly hit.

So it has been forced to develop a survival plan that enables it to continue to perform its three primary roles – first, to run the D&AD Awards to its usual high standard; second, to continue to support the emerging cohort of creative talent to find opportunities in the advertising and design industry, through the New Blood program; third, to rebuild its reserves so that it can reshape D&AD for a different, primarily digital, future.

A key part of that plan includes a significant reduction in its staff numbers. This has included a reconfiguration of its senior management team. Chief executive officer, Patrick Burgoyne, has volunteered to relinquish his role and step down. D&AD expresses its thank you for his service, first as a trustee and, since December 2019, as chief executive officer.

Dara Lynch, D&AD’s long-serving chief operations officer, will now lead the company, supported by the senior management team – president, Kate Stanners; deputy president, Ben Terret, and the D&AD Board of Trustees. Tim Lindsay will also continue to play an active role as chairman.