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“The Student Work was the highlight for me,” says juror Till Diestel. “Their lack of fear comes across as some of the best work in this year’s show.”
“What stood out to me was the creative innovation we’re witnessing at the student level,” juror Steve Denekas says. “Young talent, equipped with powerful tools at an early age, is now developing ideas that feel native to the places where culture and brands intersect—like your tiny computer, also known as your phone.”
“Overall, we saw very strong work this year, especially in the Digital category,” says juror Luc Du Sault. “I was happy to see so many brilliant solutions to different problems. As every year, posters and OOH had some amazing pieces of work.”
“I was amazed at how much work came from Canada,” juror Doug Schiff says. “Also, a surprise was seeing that Non-Traditional might have been the strongest category, with print and film being weaker than I had anticipated.”
“I was surprised to see so many good 15-second and 30-second spots,” says Du Sault. “I guess brands still need good stories to connect with their audiences, don’t they?”
“I was pleasantly surprised to find lots of humor in the film category,” juror Leslie Shaffer says.
“Humor is back,” says juror Loyiso Twala. “There was a lightness to a lot of work that implied a strong desire to truly connect with consumers in a meaningful way. Different degrees of humor were used to tackle selling products or tackling political subjects, and in many cases, it worked.”
In addition to asking the jurors for their overall impres-sions of the entries and what surprised them the most, I also asked for their biggest disappointments.
“Too many entries felt overbaked—long case studies, complex rollouts or countless moving parts—all for a payoff that didn’t land,” juror Keli Pollock says. “Budget alone doesn’t equal effectiveness. We should be rewarding clarity, resonance and impact—not just project scale. A simple, well-executed idea will always outshine a ten-layer activation no one remembers.”
“I felt the lack of simplicity and craft in a lot of work,” says Diestel. “As an industry, we need to put our passion into it, show love to the craft and stay simple.”
“The biggest disappointment about the entries is witnessing ideas that confused being ‘simple’ with being ‘simplistic,’” Twala says. “It’s a fine line: Simple ideas are like a good joke where the one who gets the idea feels smart for getting it and laughs with you. Simplistic ideas are like a bad joke where the one who gets it is left feeling undermined and laughs at you.”
“There’s a lot of opportunity for growth in craft execution,” says Shaffer. “Given Communication Arts’s reputation for celebrating exceptional craftsmanship, I see real potential for future entries to reach even higher standards and showcase the technical excellence this industry is capable of.”
“I wish I’d seen more entries in radio and print,” Du Sault says. “Creatives, take note: there are a lot of great oppor- tunities in these two categories.”
“There were very few great print pieces,” says Schiff. “Work for Dove, Mobil 1 and a handful of others stood out, but I grew up drooling over the print work within the pages of CA, so that was somewhat disappointing.”
For insight into the current state of the industry, I asked the jurors to describe how advertising is adapting to the changes in media and demographic fragmentation.
“Our industry is constantly adapting and changing, which makes it so interesting to work in,” Diestel says. “Never has there been a better time for brands to dive into cultures and subcultures. Obviously, this needs to be done right, but if you win, you gain a lot of fandom from a deeply caring audience.”
“You can certainly feel how the most relevant, effective work is now very tied to the culture of the day—not the month or the year, but the day,” says Schiff. “A large percentage of the most successful work reacted very quickly to cultural incidents in social media and in consumers’ feeds.”
“Advertising is adapting by being more intentional about audience segmentation, personalization at scale and inventing new media opportunities where it’s necessary to deliver timely messaging that isn’t only active but also highly interactive, because a lot of new media is highly responsive in real-time,” Twala says.
Lastly, I asked the jurors what changes in business, culture and society will dramatically alter the role of advertising in the future.
“The most obvious one is definitely anything related to AI, the biggest industry game changer of our lifetime,” says Diestel. “We should not be afraid and instead embrace and use these tools. Ultimately, I feel we can use the time we gain through efficiencies to craft more unique and surprising ideas. We need to care about these things.”
“AI is part of all conversations now,” Du Sault says. “It has started to dramatically change how we think, create and present our ideas, and it’s hard to predict what other changes will occur and at what pace. Two things are probable: Great creatives will survive. Average ones won’t. AI agglomerates information and delivers more expected solutions. In this new reality, I believe finding unexpected ideas will make creatives relevant.”
“With the rise of AI and the flood of lookalike content it’s creating, the next few years will be brutal for our industry,” says Pollock. “But that very sameness could spark a renaissance. AI can replicate and remix, but it doesn’t have a point of view. True creative problem solving and originality will be valued more than ever in business.”
“Beyond the developments of AI, which is now examined and dissected on a daily basis in agency boardrooms and creative department studios, the development that’s also now a cornerstone of the creative department’s arsenal is the heavy monitoring of social feeds and media, as it’s
a birthplace for inspired ideation,” Schiff says. “Keeping tabs on those worlds and finding ways for a brand to react quickly and entertainingly is a big part of our business and will only continue to grow in importance as the attention economy grows.”
“The role of advertising is to connect companies to markets with communication solutions,” says Twala. “That role in the future will be altered by the development of technology as it evolves rapidly, creat-ing agency products, strategies, media touch-points and creative solutions that drive more predictable results.”
“Advertising has always had to change and, at its best, lead culture,” Shaffer says. “With the speed of changes in tech and culture increasing, advertising will have to do the same.”
A minimum of five out of nine votes was required for a project to be awarded in this year’s competition. Judges were not permitted to vote on projects with which they were directly involved; I voted in their stead. I would like to extend our grateful appreciation to our jurors for their conscientious efforts in selecting our 66th Advertising Annual. —Patrick Coyne ca
Brynna Aylward is chief creative officer at adam&eveDDB US where she leads a dynamic team of creative directors across the New York and San Francisco offices, inspiring them to push boundaries and deliver exceptional work to drive the agency’s impact in the US market. Aylward was most recently at GUT Toronto, leading as the executive creative director and creative lead. She is passionate about leading big brands to do great work, mentoring and growing creative talent, and leaving the industry a little bit better than she found it, making her a notable figure in the advertising world.
Steve Denekas is chief creative officer of Crispin where he oversees the creative vision and product for the integrated agency and its clients. Self-taught, Denekas fell into advertising when his partner saved him from the grips of the Kinko’s color copier to become the mount room guy for BBDO. He then worked at Wieden+ Kennedy and later Instrument, part of the Stagwell network. Denekas has led creative teams at BASIC/DEPT and DEPT as chief creative officer and global senior vice president, respectively. He has made a career designing iconic campaigns for brands like Dodge, Levi’s and Nike, to name a few.
Till Diestel is the chief creative officer of Serviceplan Germany where he leads the creative output of its agencies. Before joining Serviceplan in 2022, Diestel led BBDO Germany as chief creative officer for four-and-a-half years, leading the agency to the top of the creative rankings in Germany for the first time in 2021. Prior, he spent three years at adam&eveDDB in London where he developed campaigns such as H&M Come Together, the John Lewis Christmas campaign, the Marmite Gen project and the Skittles Romance Super Bowl ad. Diestel has won more than 1,000 creative awards in total, including more than 50 Cannes Lions.
Luc Du Sault is partner and chief creative officer of LG2’s Québec City office. Du Sault fell in love with creativity at four years old when his dad brought home a storyboard for a TV spot. That passion continued to grow at Cossette where he worked on the General Motors, McDonald’s and pharma accounts. At LG2, he leads a brilliant group solving problems for Canac Hardware, Domino’s Pizza, meat producer Exceldor, Ocean Spray, the Quebec dairy board, the Quebec government and the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec. The agency’s work has been recognized by Cannes, the Clios, Communication Arts, D&AD and the One Show.
Keli Pollock is partner and chief creative officer of Daughter in Calgary. Pollock has spent more than two decades building brands that leave a lasting mark. She’s behind two of her city’s most visible and lasting brand legacies: the rebrand of Calgary as the Blue Sky City and the creation of the brand world for Calgary Wild FC, the city’s first professional women’s soccer team. At Daughter, she has helped grow the firm into a nationally recognized agency. Blurring the lines between design and advertising, her work has earned recognition at all of the industry’s major international shows throughout her career.
Mariana Sá was, until recently, co-chief creative officer at Africa Creative in São Paulo. With more than 25 years of experience, she has worked on brands such as adidas, Ambev Laboratories, Budweiser, Honda, financial company Itaú, Johnson & Johnson, Mastercard, beauty brand Natura, Nissan, PepsiCo and technology company vivo. Sá started her career in Salvador, Brazil, and then moved to São Paulo where she worked for DM9DDB, Dreamers, Globo, Lew’Lara TBWA and W/McCann. She has won awards from Cannes, Creative Club São Paulo, the Clios, the FIAP Awards and the One Show.
Doug Schiff is the creative chairman of VML Ogilvy Japan. Schiff has led accounts there for Hitachi, IBM, Spotify and Volkswagen with a creative department more than 60 strong. Before landing at Ogilvy Japan in 2018, he spent a decade at Ogilvy Beijing, eventually becoming national executive creative director and leading the creative on the agency’s biggest accounts while picking up multiple Cannes Gold Lions, China’s first-ever D&AD Yellow Pencil and Spikes’ Grand Prix. He’s married to a woman from Shanghai and enjoys nothing more than having his two bilingual sons correct his broken Mandarin.
Leslie Shaffer is chief creative officer at Fallon, an ad agency headquartered in Minneapolis. Prior to Fallon, Shaffer worked for years alongside Nikki Baker, then creative partner and now Fallon’s chief executive officer, to create award-winning work for diverse clients including ConAgra Foods, McDonald’s, Porsche and Southwest Airlines. Shaffer and Baker have been listed on Adweek’s Top 50 Creatives and Business Insider’s 30 Most Creative Women in Advertising. Her work has been recognized by the ADDYs, Cannes, the Clios, Communication Arts, D&AD, The One Show, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.
Loyiso Twala is chief creative officer of McCann Joburg in South Africa. He was named by The Loeries as one of the top 30 executive creative directors in Africa and the Middle East in 2020, and one of the top 20 chief creative officers in Africa and the Middle East in 2023. With more than two decades of integrated creative communications experience, Twala led McCann Joburg to rank eighth-best agency at Creative Circle South Africa and fifth in Sub-Saharan Africa at Cannes in 2024. He focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion as a member of the Cannes Lions ANA Global Growth for Progress Council.
