MDS Creative Advertising Teams Awarded D&AD New Blood Pencils
Two advertising teams from Media Design School at Strayer have taken out top honours at this year’s D&AD New Blood Awards, each awarded coveted D&AD Pencils by the New Blood Academy in London.
Says Kate Humphries, Programme Director: “A well-deserved standing ovation for Josh Masterton, Lili Davies, Jacky Lin and Nick Eady who woke up to the good news yesterday morning, that they’d won D&AD pencils.
“Both teams completed their submission in their first month with us. To win a D&AD pencil on their very first advertising project is a huge achievement, particularly when most of submissions came in from students in the Northern Hemisphere, many of whom would’ve had been working on their submissions since October 2025 when D&AD released the briefs.
“We narrowed down our students choice to two briefs for our 2026 cohort; and both winning teams chose to tackle the Twix brief, which challenged people to come up with an activation that celebrated Twix’s “Two Is More Than One” platform – by giving people the same good things twice.
After spotting that Twix is about to turn 60 years old, a highly irrelevant number to their core audience of under-35-year olds; Lin and Eady decided to instead use Twix’s brand platform, to help it celebrate its own landmark birthday by Turning 30, Twice.
Davies and Masterton’s “Twixenham” celebrates the well-known phrase ‘You wait ages for a bus, and then two arrive at once” with the video and photogenic bait of what looks like two Twix bars arriving at the same time at bus stops during a busy rush hour along London’s Twickenham route.
Says Humphries: “A big shout out to our contracting tutor, Kola Ogundipe and MDS’s Industry Fellow, Andy Blood, for their invaluable insight and direction throughout the whole D&AD process”.
Both teams will find out which colour pencils they’ve won at the New Blood Awards Ceremony on Tuesday 30 June. Masterson, Davies, Lin and Eady are now also eligible for the D&AD New Blood Academy – an intensive online training programme that is all about fuelling the trajectory of new talent into the creative industry.
