Next Creative Leaders 2016

When you champion creativity and diversity, you have to evolve along with your cause. And that's why in year two of The 3% Conference and The One Club's joint initiative'a year that brought both progress and setbacks for women in advertising'we set out to make sure that Next Creative Leaders continued to be a relevant source of inspiration and hope, industry wide. So instead of asking for nominations from established creative leaders (a largely male group), we decided to take our request to the source and ask young creative women to nominate themselves.

What do you get when you ask young women to put themselves forward?

You get a resounding response, some of the fiercest competition The One Club has seen, and you wind up with an astoundingly talented and truly diverse group of winners. Winners that include four women of color and a truly global perspective. Winners who have hardware from every major award show and hybrid creative minds that are changing the world by telling stories of inclusion. Casting the underrepresented as heroes. And inspiring the next generation of young women to dream in bold and brilliant color.

This year's Next Creative Leaders are proof of the incredible female talent that surfaces when we allow ourselves to see leadership through a woman's eyes'her own. Our call for self-nominations was met with an overwhelming wave of impressive entries from rising leaders around the world...who rightly saw greatness in themselves. But our 2016 winners don't just represent the very best of this incredibly stiff competition. They represent what our industry is capable of when we shed outdated modes of thinking, and open ourselves up to fresh, female perspectives.

Click on the headshots to the right to read more about each of our winners.


Article by: Laurel Stark Akman, 3% Conference Social Lead and freelance copywriter

Article Art by: Veli Akman, Manbassador and Sr Designer at Duarte

Learn more about Next Creative Leaders, our initiative with The 3% Conference, by visiting nextcreativeleaders.org.