Best Ads of the Year

Engine and VCCP were awarded the top prizes in digital pioneer Ocean Outdoor’s tenth annual digital creative competition, with campaigns for the Royal Navy and Amnesty International UK. Engine won the top brand prize with Sniper, an interactive recruitment campaign ...

The Clio Awards are 60 this year and they’re celebrating some of adland’s icons with a campaign from BBDO LA featuring a Renaissance-style mural from Sam Spratt, a film and a website featuring, inter alia, George Lois, Mary Wells Lawrence, ...

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” (Dr. Seuss.) Or, to put it another way: reading is good for you. I doubt this brooks much disagreement: ...

YouTube has unveiled its top performing ads for 2018 through to December 12 (excluding Christmas) and there are some decent conventional ones – Lucky Generals for Amazon in first place, quite a funny one for OPPO F7 Indian cricket, ‘Dream ...

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 ...