CLOSE-UP: NEWSMAKER - WOLFF OLINS. Wolff Olins' D&AD award reflects shift in ad industry.

Design consultancies are becoming more important to brands, John Tylee says.

The only question begged by this year's D&AD President's Award going to the design consultants Wally Olins and Michael Wolff is why it's taken so long.

More than three decades have passed since the 'godfathers' of brand identity began laying the foundations for the time today when establishing a brand's personality is seen as just as important as how the brand is communicated.

How curious, therefore, that the founders of Wolff Olins, whose work includes everything from BT's 'prancing piper' and Labour's Red Rose to persuading Guinness to become Diageo, have had to wait until their twilight years before they too have joined their famous contemporaries on the D&AD honours list.

Some say the 20-year stand-off between Wolff Olins and D&AD sprang from a time when D&AD's brand of luvviness and insularity was at odds with Olins' view that the design sector couldn't work in isolation from the business world.

Michael Johnson, the D&AD president, whose decision it was to honour the pair, remembers his first job at Wolff Olins in the mid-80s when Olins, with his trademark dicky bow and thick-rimmed glasses, was refining his theories about how design consultants should be collaborating with the likes of McKinsey and Bain on brand strategy.

'What they've done is force businesses to look at themselves and at their inadequacies and rethink things they took for granted,' Lord Puttnam, the former adman turned movie mogul, says.