The Creatives Room

2010s Advertising

The 2010s saw advertising fully reckon with the social media age. Campaigns were designed to be shared, debated, and remixed. Always '#LikeAGirl' sparked a global conversation about gender. Dumb Ways to Die became the most awarded campaign of its era by making a safety message genuinely entertaining. The decade also saw the rise of purpose-driven advertising - brands taking positions on social issues in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. Not all of it was good. But the best of it was extraordinary.

The campaigns in this collection

1. Liberty Biberty - Liberty Mutual · Goodby Silverstein & Partners · 2019

   The campaign pokes fun at the polished stiffness of traditional insurance advertising through behind-the-scenes meta-humor. Tapping into the insight that consumers are exhausted by repetitive insurance jargon and hyper-earnest spokespeople, the creative embraces self-deprecating parody featuring an

2. Hungry Copywriter Wanted - McCann · McCann Bristol · 2018

   Created as a recruitment advertisement for agency McCann Bristol, the campaign literalizes the idiomatic phrase 'hungry copywriter wanted.' Featuring a heavily chewed blue plastic pen lid—a classic hallmark of deep-thinking or nervous writers—the execution visually equates creative hunger with the n

3. The Crow's Vow - 826DC · David Drummond · 2010

   Cover for Susan Briscoe's poetry collection The Crow's Vow. Letting a real crow replace its own name makes the bird literal on the page - fitting for poems that use crows to trace a marriage.

4. The Heretic's Daughter - Back Bay Books · Julianna Lee · 2010

   Cover for Kathleen Kent's The Heretic's Daughter, set in the Salem witch trials. The girl's steady, shadowed stare in her plain bonnet embodies a child caught in her mother's accusation - innocence under threat.

5. What the Thunder Said - Picador · Leeann Falciani · 2010

   Cover for Janet Peery's What the Thunder Said. The approaching dust storm sets the collection firmly in the Dust Bowl - hardship and endurance bearing down on the Oklahoma plains.

6. A Town Like Alice - Vintage · Jamie Keenan · 2010

   Cover for Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice. Pairing the genteel heroine with the Australian outback frames the novel's arc - a wartime love story that ends in building a life in a remote town.

7. Pnin - Vintage · Carin Goldberg · 2010

   Cover for Nabokov's Pnin. The text-woven bow tie stands in for the fussy, endearing emigre professor - a man made of language and old-world formality.

8. Americans in Paris - Number 17 · 2010

   Anthology cover that renders the transatlantic literary pilgrimage literally as airmail: the flight-path arc and envelope framing turn Americans' long romance with Paris into a piece of correspondence in transit.

9. Eight Weeks of Bruce - Owen Glidersleeve · 2010

   Cover for "Eight Weeks of Bruce." The title carved out of a spreading wine spill sets a warm, messy, comedic tone - domestic life and a little chaos, made by hand rather than typeset.

10. El Tercer Reich - Katya Mezhibovskaya · 2010

    Cover for Roberto Bolano's The Third Reich. Elegant yellow script clashing against a grimy war-game image and torn label captures the novel's creeping menace - a holiday and a strategy game shading into dread.

11. Nocturno de Chile - Katya Mezhibovskaya · 2010

    Cover for Roberto Bolano's By Night in Chile. The crushed paper and sickly green suggest a night of feverish, guilty confession - the priest-narrator's reckoning with complicity under Pinochet.

12. No Country For Old Men - David Pearson · 2010

    Cover for Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. The battered Western signage type matches the novel's borderland dread and vanishing frontier code - beauty scoured down to bone.

13. Suttree - David Pearson · 2010

    Cover for Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. The worn frontier wood-type gives the sprawling Tennessee-river novel its craggy, hand-hewn character, matching McCarthy's "stark, mythic" prose.

14. The Lumberman's Frontier - David Drummond · 2010

    Cover for Thomas R. Cox's history of American forests. The men sawing the black monolith down to a ringed stump distils centuries of logging into one image - a frontier measured in felled trees.

15. The Road - David Pearson · 2010

    Cover for Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Type flecked with ash makes the design itself feel burnt - the grey, cinder-covered world of the post-apocalyptic novel rendered in the letters.

16. The Sky Below - Jennifer Carrow · 2010

    Cover for Stacey D'Erasmo's The Sky Below. The upward view from a coffin-like box toward light captures the novel's pull between entrapment and escape - reaching for sky from somewhere buried.

17. Silk Parachute - Farrar, Straus and Giroux · Susan Mitchell · 2010

    Cover for John McPhee's essay collection Silk Parachute. The little toy parachute dwarfed by the cliffs nods to the title essay's boyhood gift and to McPhee's gift for finding big stories in small things.

18. Conversations with Woody Allen - Knopf · Chip Kidd™ · 2010

    Cover for Eric Lax's Conversations with Woody Allen. The pensive portrait wreathed in snippets of talk mirrors the book's form - decades of candid interviews about film, laid out like a scattered chat.

19. The Mind's Eye - Knopf · Chip Kidd™ · 2010

    Chip Kidd's cover for Oliver Sacks's The Mind's Eye. The eye-test chart dissolving into blur embodies the book's subject - vision, perception and the brain's ways of seeing when sight fails.

20. The Essential Engineer - Knopf · Chip Kidd™ · 2010

    Cover for Henry Petroski's The Essential Engineer. Tower and turbines flanking the sun cast engineering as the practical force that turns scientific ideas into real solutions.

21. Mr. Toppit - Other Press · John Gall · 2010

    Cover for Charles Elton's Mr. Toppit. The shadowy forest lurking behind the loud type nods to the sinister children's-book character at the story's heart - "The End" of the Hayseed Chronicles casting a long shadow.

22. Crisis Economics - Penguin · Christopher Brand · 2010

    Cover for Roubini and Mihm's Crisis Economics. The alarm-coloured, stacked type conveys emergency and authority at once - a hard-hitting post-crash reckoning with the future of finance.

23. Hiding Man - Picador · Jason Ramirez · 2010

    Cover for Tracy Daugherty's biography Hiding Man. Type fading into the grey embodies the elusive, hard-to-pin-down Donald Barthelme - a writer forever slipping out of view.

24. The White Mary - Picador · Kelly Blair · 2010

    Cover for Kira Salak's The White Mary. The pale butterfly floating against dense jungle evokes the novel's search deep in Papua New Guinea - fragile, luminous purpose amid overwhelming wilderness.

Why this collection is worth studying

The defining tension of 2010s advertising was between authenticity and scale - between campaigns that felt genuinely meaningful and campaigns that performed meaningfulness for commercial gain. The work that endured from this decade was the work that started from a real truth rather than a trend. The work that faded was the work that chased the conversation rather than starting one.

See also

• Best Ads of the 2000s
• Best Ads of the 2020s