Guan Hin’s D&AD jury president’s diary – Day 2

Tay Guan Hin is this year’s D&AD jury foreman for the Poster category. It’s a big honour for JWT’s Regional ECD South Asia. Here Guan gives his views on his second day of judging.

By the time I arrived at the judge’s lounge it was packed. The crowd has been growing. There are more judges turning up today to judge their respective categories.

I tried to quickly catch up with some familiar faces before our Jury manager summoned us to our ‘Pod’. As we got to our area, something was missing…in fact 900 odd pieces have disappeared from the poster walls and only 233 pieces remain.

The next 30 mins, we paced back and forth to make sure we didn’t makeany bad decisions. Laura, our jury manager, got us back together tovote for the shortlist using our ipods.

But before that, I had to remind everyone what the judging criteriaare… Firstly, is it highly original and inspiring. Secondly, it’s mustbe exceptionally well executed. Thirdly, it must be relevant to itscontext. Right after, we had a long debate on what it means to berelevant to its

context. Context to the category? Context to the consumer? I knew it was going to be a long day.

So, we quickly voted and left for lunch.

Upon returning, I had expected the entries to dwindle to 50 pieces.However, 100 odd pieces still remained. So, we decided it’s beneficialto the entire group to discuss openly on each piece before we votedagain.

What I thought would take an hour took 3-4 hours as we debated anythingfrom where the ad ran to how WWF could afford the budget to run so manyads. I must admit, it was fun to hear arguments won or lose dependingon how passionate each judge fought for their case.

Each judge brought a very different perspective. Work that I didn’tlike made lot more sense after listening to each argument. We concludedtoday by voting one last time. It’s a brutal affair when we have to beso thorough about what goes inside the book.

I guess that makes D&AD stand apart from rest.

Hopefully, there’ll be more consensus on the final selection tomorrow.But I’m very doubtful. Because we’ll probably change our minds again.