Best Ads of the Year

Smart cities have long been a concept reserved for sci-fi films, but with recent technological advancements, they’re quickly becoming a reality. Media owners have begun to make city-wide audiences available and more addressable using smart city technology in less intrusive ...

A Cover Girl gals-on-the-town effort featuring Awkward Black Girl Issa Rae and pals by Droga5 New York got our highest score of the year from Emma Hall, 9.5 for a presumably unscripted epic. Difficult to pull off but Droga succeeds ...

One way or another India features heavily in awards these days and here’s another candidate that surely has a Cannes category in waiting. It’s by Dentsu Webchutney for Chakra Tea and the wheeze in question is a tea kettle that ...

We had lots of good ads in June, including Top Tips for Cannes and (some of) the winners. Here are two, from directors at different ends of the scale, showing that directing still matters in these data-driven-content days. Somesuch director ...

May produced a decent crop of ad campaigns, not least the latest from Nationwide’s poet’s corner featuring Jo Bell. By VCCP. Buzzman produced an animated epic for Delsey. WCRS’ debut for Sky Mobile was a lively effort, no mean feat ...

Where does creative advertising fit into the spectrum of services that the various contenders for marketing budgets are now offering? From the consultancies to the ad-based holding companies, nobody seems quite sure. It’s accepted that it’s no longer all about ...

We didn’t do a Best Ads of 2018 in January because there didn’t seem any: Oh no, is it true what they’re all saying about the death of creativity? February looked as though it was going out with a whimper ...

Is adland a more misery-inducing location than it used to be? Most people would probably say yes, if only because – for those who survived a few years – recollections tend to be the good bits. But there’s also a ...

Wieden+Kennedy London’s having a good year so far and its ‘Go Binge’ campaign for Three continues the rich vein, with another inimitable invention ‘dolph-a-sloth.’ W+K manages to make Three likeable, no mean achievement for a mobile provider. Come on Vodafone, ...