The Creatives Room

Award-Winning Campaigns

Awards aren't the point of great advertising, but they're a reliable signal of craft, originality, and ideas that landed. This collection pulls together recognised work from the major shows - Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, Clios and beyond - so you can study what a jury-level idea looks like across categories. A reference library of the industry at its best.

The campaigns in this collection

1. The Pale King - Hamish Hamilton · Jon Gray · 2011

   Cover for David Foster Wallace's posthumous The Pale King. Faint pencil on accounting paper evokes the novel's setting in a tax office - and the unfinished, handwritten drafts left behind.

2. 40 Years of Passion - RENAULT · 2017

   To reassert its racing credentials following its return as a full works Formula 1 team, Renault needed to remind motorsport fans and consumers of its deep technical legacy alongside luxury racing rivals. The campaign grounds 40 years of F1 participation in an unbroken thread of engineering obsession

3. The Wisdom of the East - 5 Takabb · Phenomena Co. · 2022

   To bridge the generational gap for a century-old Thai herbal cough pill brand, this campaign tackles the cultural barrier that younger consumers find the product's intense bitterness and traditional centipede packaging outdated. The creative idea parodies high-concept, Western-narrated documentaries

4. Innovating Saving - Jet.com · rga · 2015

   A startup with no media money applied its own product promise - saving - to its advertising. It made an online commercial for actual super bowls, tagged so precisely that it out-ranked every real Super Bowl ad on the search term 'Super Bowl commercial' and took millions of views over the weekend wit

5. The One To Watch | Now Streaming | Max - HBO Max · hbo max in-house · 2023

   To solve the business challenge of rebranding HBO Max to Max while merging Discovery+ content, the campaign addresses the tension of household viewing fragmentation, where family members juggle multiple apps for prestige dramas and casual reality TV. The big idea, The One to Watch, positions the sim

6. Coming Soon In 2023 | Max - HBO Max · bbh · 2023

   To navigate its high-stakes transition from HBO Max to the simplified "Max" platform, the brand needed to reassure subscribers that the rebrand represented an expansion of library content rather than a dilution of HBO's premium prestige. The campaign used its highly anticipated 2023 programming slat

7. It Has to Be Heinz - Heinz · Rethink · 2024

   Restaurants around the world were caught refilling empty Heinz bottles with cheap generic ketchup - and rather than take offence, Heinz turned the fraud into the proof: even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz. The insight is that the deception is itself an admission, because nobody bothers to d

8. iPad Air Pencil - iPad Air · TBWA\Media Arts Lab · 2014

   The film opens on a pencil, holds on it, and only slowly reveals that the iPad Air is hiding behind it - thinner than the object it is standing next to. The insight is that a specification in millimetres means nothing, but a comparison with an object every person on earth has held means everything.

9. Dumb Ways to Die - Metro Trains · McCann Melbourne · 2012

   A cheerful cartoon song lists increasingly stupid ways to die - poking a grizzly bear, selling both kidneys - before arriving at the genuinely dumb ones: standing on the edge of a train platform, driving round a level crossing. The insight is that young people are immune to authority, statistics and

10. Writes Long - Faber Castell · ogilvy · 2015

    The campaign personifies pencils as deeply wrinkled, weary elderly characters to visually demonstrate their exceptional writing lifespan. It taps into the insight that we associate physical aging and wrinkles with a long, hard-working life, humorously applying this human truth to an inanimate object

Why this collection is worth studying

Award-winning work divides opinion among creatives - some see it as the highest standard, others as a game divorced from real-world effectiveness. The truth is somewhere in between. At their best, award shows reward genuine craft and genuine ideas. At their worst, they reward ideas built to win awards. This collection leans toward the former: work that won because it was great, not work that was engineered to look great to a jury.

See also

• Cannes Lions Winners
• Female-Led Campaigns