The Creatives Room

2020s Advertising

The 2020s began in crisis and advertising responded. Campaigns made during the pandemic rediscovered what brands were actually for - not products, but communities. The decade also brought AI into the creative process, new questions about deepfakes and synthetic media, and a backlash against empty brand purpose that pushed the best creatives back toward craft, wit, and genuine surprise. It's a decade that's still being written, but its early chapters are instructive.

The campaigns in this collection

  1. Can't is Dead - Base44 · 2026

    The campaign centers on a rallying cry for a new generation of creators and innovators, boldly declaring that 'Can't is Dead.' Tapping into a cultural shift away from traditional gatekeeping and limiting mindsets, the strategic insight asserts that modern tools and relentless drive render former tec

  2. Can I get uhhhhh - McDonald's · 2022

    The creative taps into the universal, highly relatable human truth of pulling up to a fast-food drive-thru speaker and pausing indecisively with 'Can I get uhhhhh...' Tapping into this ubiquitous cultural moment, the brand uses environmental design to turn a mundane parking lot into a humorous, self

  3. Point Line Plane - Thames & Hudson · Tom Etherington · 2025

    Cover for Kengo Kuma's Point Line Plane. Reducing the design to the three named geometric elements mirrors the architect's essay on the fundamental building blocks of form and space.

  4. Nettle - Zephyr · Jessie Price · 2025

    Cover for Bex Hogan's Nettle. The girl cloaked in living green amid the bewitched wood conjures the fairy-tale world of the novel - nature, enchantment and hidden danger entwined.

  5. Avantgardists - Thames & Hudson · Jack Smyth · 2025

    Cover for Sjeng Scheijen's Avantgardists. The design directly quotes Russian Constructivist graphics - the very revolutionary art movement the book chronicles, its form matching its subject.

  6. Clean - 4th Estate · Julian Humphries · 2025

    Cover for Alia Trabucco Zeran's Clean. One broad swipe - as if wiping something away - plays on the title and the novel's narrator, a housemaid scrubbing at a truth that won't come clean.

  7. She Is Haunting - Bloomsbury Children’s Books · Thy Bui · 2024

    Cover for Trang Thanh Tran's She Is a Haunting. Blooms overtaking a silenced mouth evoke the novel's devouring haunted house - decay disguised as beauty, a girl unable to speak the horror.

  8. The Cat Prince - Corsair Poetry · Jon Gray · 2024

    Cover for Michael Pedersen's The Cat Prince. The crowned, arch-backed cat gives the title poem a cheeky mascot - regal and feral at once, matching the collection's tender, mischievous tone.

  9. Banana Yoshimoto - Faber · Sophie Harris · 2025

    Cover for Banana Yoshimoto's The Premonition. The solitary figure in glimmering night water evokes the novel's mood of memory, foreboding and gentle unease - someone alone with a feeling they can't name.

  10. The Marigold - ECW Press · Jo Walker · 2024

    Cover for Andrew F. Sullivan's The Marigold. Towers infested with creeping mould and strange growths captures the eco-horror of a rotting, sinking city literally consumed from within.

  11. Earl Lovelace - Faber · Kishan Rajani · 2025

    Cover for Earl Lovelace's The Schoolmaster. The imposing figure hovering over the wary girl signals the novel's story of authority and its abuse in a remote Trinidadian village.

  12. Adam Mars-Jones - Faber · Jonathan Pelham · 2024

    Faber cover for Adam Mars-Jones's Cedilla. The flamboyant fairground lettering matches the novel's garrulous, digressive comic voice - a big, showy performance of a book.

  13. Cahokia Jazz - Faber · Henry Petrides · 2025

    Cover for Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz. The jazz-age deco skyline conjures the novel's alternate-history 1920s American city - a noir mystery set in a world that never was.

  14. Glasgow Boys - Faber · Jonathan Pelham · 2025

    Cover for Margaret McDonald's YA novel Glasgow Boys. The vulnerable figure against sky over a housing tower captures two care-leavers finding their feet - warmth and hardship in the same frame.

  15. Pilcrow - Faber · Jonathan Pelham · 2024

    Faber cover for Adam Mars-Jones's Pilcrow. The showy fairground lettering, echoing its companion Cedilla, brands the series and suits the novel's expansive, voluble narrator.

  16. Napalm in the Heart - Faber · Henry Petrides · 2025

    Cover for Pol Guasch's Napalm in the Heart. Body merging into blasted landscape captures the novel's post-apocalyptic love story - desire and devastation sharing the same skin.

  17. Never Tell Anyone Your Name - HopeRoad · James Nunn · 2024

    Cover for Federico Ivanier's YA thriller Never Tell Anyone Your Name. The jostling, high-contrast block type feels like a warning shouted from all directions - unease dressed in playful colour.

  18. Prophet - Jonathan Cape · Dan Mogford · 2024

    Cover for Macdonald and Blache's Prophet. The oily, shape-shifting chrome type evokes the novel's uncanny substance that materialises people's nostalgia - beautiful, unstable and dangerous.

  19. Sarah Waters - Little Brown · Nico Taylor · 2025

    Cover for Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet. The pair half-hidden behind stage velvet captures the novel's music-hall setting and its clandestine Victorian lesbian romance - desire glimpsed from the wings.

  20. Secrets of the Snakestone - Nosy Crow · 2025

    Cover for Piu DasGupta's middle-grade novel Secrets of the Snakestone. The great coiling snake winding through a hidden world signals a Paris-set mystery full of secret passages, magic and danger.

  21. Company - One (Pushkin Press) · Anna Morrison · 2025

    Cover for Shannon Sanders's story collection Company. The figures crossing and overlapping through colour panels evoke the visitors, kin and guests - the "company" - who move through these linked family stories.

  22. Size - Penguin Viking · Chris Bentham · 2024

    Cover for Vaclav Smil's Size. The oversized word measured against a ruler literalises the subject - scale itself, and how measurement shapes our understanding of everything.

  23. The Violence of Britishness - Pluto Press · Steve Leard · 2024

    Cover for Nadya Ali's The Violence of Britishness. Barbed wire slicing across the title makes the argument visceral - national belonging enforced through borders, exclusion and harm.

  24. Fear - Profile · Tom Etherington · 2024

    Cover for Robert Peckham's Fear. The uncanny plague-doctor mask makes dread tangible - the perfect emblem for a history told through humanity's terrors, from plagues to panics.

Why this collection is worth studying

The most useful thing about studying very recent advertising is the clarity it brings to questions about what's actually working. Trends move fast; good ideas move slower. The campaigns in this collection have already started to separate themselves from the noise - they have a quality of confidence, specificity, and genuine creative ambition that suggests they'll still be referenced a decade from now.

See also

Best Ads of the 2020s - The Creatives Room