BEST TV Winner: Bring '
Sabotage'. This sweet short film for Norwegian courier company Bring asks and delightfully answers the question: what's the downside of having your packages reliably and consistently delivered? A simple story told with beautiful performances, witty and artful in-camera visuals, and careful attention to VFX craft, this one stood out against the others and easily held my (usually pathetically short) attention for a full 3 minutes and 45 seconds. Really nice, I wish I made this.
Runner up: Sky Bet '
For the Fans'. We've all written these genre-hopping mega sequence spots, but this one holds its own for its complex fight sequences and epic execution. The logic of the resolve at the end isn't perfect, but the spot is fun and appropriate for an entertainment platform with a lot on the menu.
BEST PRINT Winner: Los Cebiches de la Ruminahui '
Resurrection friends'. Cure your Easter hangover is the message from this Ecuadorian ceviche brand, nicely visualized through a series of cursed and bedridden moments reminiscent of renaissance paintings. These are the sorts of ads it used to take a lot of time, living- breathing artists, and endless revisions to get right, and now AI can knock out a series of complex visuals, on behalf of a soup, in a snap. It's really fun to see a new generation of creatives able to turn out simple, highly conceptual and pretty well-executed ideas like this.
Runner up: Netflix '
As bugs'. Choosing the runner up was tough. This campaign doesn't land perfectly, and I wish it played more with the language and idea of how humans are like bugs to other life forms, but the visuals are arresting and now I'm pretty intrigued about the show.
BEST OUTDOOR Winner: Telstra Satellite Home Internet '
From Space to Your Place'. Charming and inventively created images that naively capture the strange miracle of space magic in your own backyard, AKA Telstra satellite internet. Really enjoying the work coming out of BMEOF, full of charisma and always craft forward, as it should be.
Runner up: McDonald's '
Smells Like McDonald's'. Super simple execution, I can even smell the billboard without experiencing the piece. Very few brands have the distinctive brand assets of McDonald's and it's fun to see an agency working with even the invisible ones.
BEST INTERACTIVEWinner:
Hypnovels. I'm on board with anything designed to get more people to consume creative writing, and this idea that creates hypnotic films generated by chapters as prompts for an AI text-to-video tool is pretty cool. Why read boring old words when you can turn the stories into rich and trippy worlds that bring you along? Fun stuff.
Runner up: World Literacy Foundation '
The Literacy Pen'. Comes off as a prototype and just a theory, but I hope this is real or close to being so. A tool that helps you to write a word you just spoke, it's simple and technically possible and, with 21% of adults in the United States currently classified as illiterate, has the potential to help a lot of people if it does exist.
BEST RADIOWinner: Engen Quick Shop + Co '
What you can't get at 3am/4am/5am'. Just when you thought all the good radio ideas had been done. This well-written and inventive copy-driven campaign is just great storytelling and lovely to listen to, without a ton of tricky sound effects either.
Runner up: TrackSAFE NZ '
Steely Stare'. Clever use of sound design to create a behavior on the road, this is a smart answer to a real brief that will likely get stuck in people's heads - and might even save a few lives on the road. Nicely done.
This week's guest judge is Justine Armour, partner and chief creative officer at FIG, New York.
With over two decades of wide-ranging standout work, Justine's career has taken her from copywriting in Brisbane and Sydney, to creative directing in Portland and leading agencies in New York. She has won major accolades for work on brands like Hahn SuperDry, Old Spice, Secret, Halo Top, P&G, Applebee's, Dodge and Smirnoff. She has been named to the Adweek Creative 100, AdAge Leading Women, and she helped lead Grey New York to win AdAge Comeback Agency of the Year in 2022. She is now chief creative officer and partner at New York independent agency, FIG.
