Culture Matters
D&AD Presidents Mary Lewis and Lisa Smith in conversation
A Language Step Change
additional title support line here?
Erin Leahy - Growth & Marketing Director
The creative industry talks a lot about culture. But as an industry we are losing it.
Mary Lewis set this out on stage at the D&AD Festival, when asked what she would change about the creative industry overnight. Not AI. Not hybrid working. Not gender imbalance though she cares about these too.
Culture. It matters.
This is more than just a rallying cry. And comes from the person who became the first female President of D&AD in 1995, and the first to be awarded the President’s Award in 2001. She has watched the industry she helped shape go through every iteration of itself since.
When Mary talks about culture, she doesn't mean awaydays. Or Spotify playlists or the values cemented on the wall. She means the intangible under which good work becomes possible. She means being in the studio together, taking time to reflect."Something as simple as waking up the next morning and thinking is this the best thing I've ever done, or best in the bin…?” she said."That doesn't happen when everything is super glossy and instantaneous at the click of a button.”
"You do not form relationships on screen" she said, as someone who has spent four decades watching what happens when people make thinags together, and what happens when they don't. Culture is not a thing you install, it accretes. It comes from proximity and friction.
What erodes culture, in Mary's diagnosis, is scale. She describes 'mashups and mergers'. The logic of growth that turns studios with genuine identities (she compared them to football clubs with a real sense of belonging) into divisions of the big and the bland. "Culture goes out the door," she said, “and when culture goes, creativity follows…"
She's right. And the industry has been watching this happen for years while calling it progress. The industry does not lack people who understand culture. It lacks people willing to protect it. Timeline is short when deadlines are fast.
The ‘click-button’ culture doesn't just make things faster; it also removes the holistic experiences that make work richer. Experimentation, the failed attempts, the questioning, the sketches and the interrogation of the ‘right’ answer. In short, it stops ‘play' and encourages 'job done'.
Image: Robert Moberly 'cultivating culture' in the early days of Lewis Moberly
It doesn’t feel like nostalgia talking; Mary argues for the preservation of a particular kind of rigour and human interaction, one that technology can accelerate around, but cannot replicate. She has consistently held that standard.
As President, she recalled the divide between design and advertising which has now come full circle, with blurred lines and new client expectations. Separate dinners at the D&AD awards were on committee agendas. Separate cultures were fiercely protected. She helped bridge this as a designer with a background in advertising as well as an adman partner. She ensured design shared the same platform.
Presiding over the first, highly successful, public exhibition of British Design and Advertising together at the Saatchi Gallery, she described Design as enduring and Advertising as transient. Both important and, at their best, reaching for the emotional. “Work that wins the eye, the heart, and then the mind”.
Image: Lewis Moberly hold D&AD Gold for Design Excellence
Image: The Glenrothes The 42
"Quite simply, you won't have seen it before.” That's what Michael Wolff told Mary in the early days of Lewis Moberly, when she asked what it took to win a D&AD pencil. Mary has held that dear ever since with the mantra 'expect the unexpected'. Her pioneering work for multi-award-winning Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients, Gatwick Airport and The Glenrothes is testament to this.
The industry also talks at length about differentiation, and the need to cut through. Never before has 'clarity held such weight'. People are bombarded with choice, navigation is all. How to achieve clarity requires focus and a culture where people are free to debate.
Mary believes that great design is alive and well thirty years on. But what has changed is how hard it is to protect the conditions that make it possible. The pressure to scale, systemise and deliver hard and fast.
She misses the glamour and theatre D&AD projected. She remembers “The Dorchester chandeliers, drums rolling and lights dimming…” – “Let’s bring it back” agreed Lisa. Mary also noted the awards landscape is now highly populated, but there is still only one to win – a D&AD pencil (ideally black). She admires D&AD new inclusivity, but cautioned against “something for everyone. D&AD must own the highground and send out the signals”.
Imagery: Waitrose Cooks' ingredients, D&AD Annual
Mary Lewis of Lewis Moberly was in conversation with Lisa Smith of Uncommon Creative Studio at the D&AD Festival President's Lecture, May 2026.
Subscribe to The Friday Edit
Thanks, we received your submission.
work with us
workwithus@lewismoberly.com
join us
joinus@lewismoberly.com
telephone
020 7580 9252
Lewis Moberly, 33 Gresse Street
London W1T 1QU