Gold
GoldA Cry for Hydration
- Entrant
- Imago OGILVY
- Country
- Croatia
- Brand
- Studena
- Advertiser
- Radenska
This campaign is built entirely on local culture and behavior. It uses "Narikače" (traditional Croatian mourning performers) and reimagines them as Studena Wailers in everyday situations people instantly understand. The campaign also builds on a local social habit: tagging friends to call them out. The tone, humor, and scenarios are specific to the Croatian mindset. Because of this, the idea could not be replicated without the same cultural context, making the brand feel genuinely and powerfully local, not just located in a place.
Brand Context
How does a local water brand break through in a commoditised category where everyone claims 'natural' and 'pure'? Studena is a Croatian spring water brand sourced in Lipik. While inherently local, it faced a critical challenge: the bottled water category had become a sea of sameness. Generic messaging about purity and nature had made the entire category easy to ignore, with consumers defaulting to price or convenience rather than brand preference. For Studena, this created three interconnected problems: a business challenge of justifying its premium positioning, a marketing challenge of low brand salience, and a behavioral barrier where con...
Silver
SilverCgates
- Entrant
- Fabula Rud Pedersen Lithuania
- Country
- Lithuania
- Brand
- Cgates
- Advertiser
- Fabula Rud Pedersen Lithuania
Cgates is the fastest, but not the biggest internet provider in Lithuania. To strengthen brand awareness (Top of Mind) and consideration, we built the “Eik tu namas” image campaign around a deliberately narrow, honest positioning: Cgates doesn't sell “internet for everyone” - it sells the world's first and fastest “Flat Internet”, aimed at one clear audience, apartment residents. This spin-off extended that idea into a channel no one else dared to touch.
Cgates had a weak brand Point of Difference: it was often confused with competitors or simply unknown, its service only works in flats, and its marketing budget was smaller than the competition's. We needed maximum impact and reach, but couldn't outspend anyone. So we asked: why advertise where everyone else is, when we can own a space they're all afraid of?
We took the campaign somewhere no internet provider goes - porn sites, because ignoring an audience that big would, in our words, be the real indecency. Good content needs good internet, and bad internet always breaks at the worst possible moment.
To keep continuity, we brought back the same recognizable character from the main campaign - the one who kept shouting "This...
SilverFlags of Victory
- Entrant
- Holy Motors
- Country
- Georgia
- Brand
- Todua Clinic
- Advertiser
- Todua Clinic
Full materials - https://flagsofvictory.com/
Background
For more than 30,000 Georgian women living with cancer, colorful headscarves are not a fashion choice. Worn throughout treatment, they conceal its most visible signs and often become a way to avoid the stares, questions and pity that come with a diagnosis.
In Georgia, cancer is still surrounded by silence. Screening rates remain alarmingly low, recovery stories are rarely visible, and the disease is seldom discussed openly in the media. For many patients and families, a diagnosis is still perceived as a road of no return.
Todua Clinic, Georgia’s largest oncology center, wanted to challenge that narrative.
The clinic’s strategy was built around hope: not abstract optimism, but the confidence that comes from seeing real proof that recovery is possible. Survivors could offer something statistics alone could not: visible evidence that cancer can be faced, endured and overcome.
The challenge was to turn that hope into a symbol powerful enough to break through a deeply rooted cultural taboo.
Idea and Execution
The headscarf was already the most recognizable symbol of cancer treatment. But it was usually worn to conceal...
SilverThe Foundation of Cyber Excellence
- Entrant
- Magic
- Country
- Latvia
- Brand
- The National Cybersecurity Centre
- Advertiser
- Ministry of Defence of Latvia, CERT.LV
Cybercrime has become one of the fastest-growing threats in Latvia. Despite constant warnings from businesses and government institutions, society has not become vigilant enough. In the first months of 2025 alone, thousands of scams were reported, costing residents tens of millions of euros.
To break through the noise, the campaign used an unexpected cultural reference.
The National Cybersecurity Centre of Latvia recruited the country’s most famous fictional scammers to help residents protect themselves - the characters from the cult comedy The Foundation of Criminal Excellence. Once a beloved film about scam artists, it suddenly felt perfectly suited to today’s reality.
The film’s original cast and style returned to smaller screens - this time as The Foundation of Cyber Excellence, exposing modern scam tactics and becoming the most unlikely educators on cybercrime.
We rolled out a six-part mini-series, releasing episodes one by one on social media, each exposing a common scam technique. Later, the film’s characters appeared in daily content, collaborated with influencers, and engaged with audiences across platforms.
Bronze
BronzeThe Pink Oath
- Entrant
- McCann Riga
- Country
- Latvia
- Brand
- Pink Train Foundation
- Advertiser
- Pink Train Foundation
Once intentions are stated publicly, people are 30% more likely to follow through. And one of the most powerful ways to put intentions into words is an oath. The fundamental oath in medicine is the Hippocratic Oath: a pledge to do good, avoid harm, and treat every patient as you'd want to be treated yourself. But doctors can't help patients who don't show up. To bridge this gap, we encouraged women to take the Pink Oath to make their breast health a priority — the first pledge for women to put themselves first. The campaign was designed as a digital-first ecosystem, where every touchpoint drove participation and sharing. To scale engagement, influential Latvian women (from politicians to media personalities) shared personalized oath videos across social platforms, adapting the message to their audiences and professions. This triggered a wave of user-generated content, as women created and posted their own Pink Oaths. Digital momentum was amplified through PR and extended into real-world touchpoints, including clinics and partner platforms. A mobile mammogram, promoted through digital channels, enabled women to act on their pledges, connecting online commitment with offline behavior...
Shortlist
ShortlistDon’t Be a Guinea Pig (Ära ole katsejänes)
- Entrant
- La Ecwador
- Country
- Estonia
- Brand
- Republic of Estonia Health Board
- Advertiser
- Republic of Estonia Health Board
In Estonian, “guinea pig” translates culturally as “katsejänes” — literally, “test rabbit.”
Young people are increasingly choosing beauty services based on price, social media appeal and availability rather than verified expertise. When an unqualified provider is “still practicing”, someone inevitably becomes the person they practice on.
By turning that person into a literal beauty-enhanced guinea pig, we made an invisible health risk instantly visible — and gave consumers one simple action: check the provider’s qualifications before you trust them.
Before the campaign’s official launch, we created a fake Instagram account, @bunnybeauty_angela, posing as an inexperienced beauty provider. Within a week, it gained 200+ followers and received real booking requests from young people eager to get cheap lashes and permanent makeup. We even ran Q&As asking followers which unverified beauty products we should order from sketchy third-country marketplaces. Instead of raising red flags, people actively joined in and expressed which nails/lashes they wanted to see on themselves.
To push the experiment further, influencer Hanna Martinson visited Angela for a “permanent makeup” appointment....
ShortlistThe Aluminati
- Entrant
- McCann Riga
- Country
- Latvia
- Brand
- Alumni Association of Stockholm School of Economics in Riga
- Advertiser
- Alumni Association of Stockholm School of Economics in Riga
SSE Riga is the most prestigious economics school in the Baltics. It needed to raise 200'000 from alumni in 40 days to fund scholarships. But years of polite requests had stopped working. So we asked a different question: when is a large sum of money raised fast? When there is something to lose. We created The Aluminati and turned fundraising into a ransom. A secretive organisation abducted a beloved professor. To get him back, alumni had to pay. This was not a donation. This was a rescue mission. A ransom newsletter was delivered to all alumni. The tone was clear. Immediate action was required. A live donation platform tracked the ransom in real time. Every milestone unlocked new content. New clues. New messages. Rising tension. A leaderboard stoked competitive egos. "Who cares the most" became the only question. To fuel rivalry even more, social media challenged alumni cohorts. Classes competed and pride was on the line. Physical props blurred fiction and reality. We even created realistic silicone fingers with artist Brenda Jansone. Polaroid photos hinted at conspiracy boards. And we made a huge 2x4m board on the university premises. Sometimes, to save scholarships, you have to...
ShortlistPowder
- Entrant
- Not Perfect Vilnius
- Country
- Lithuania
- Brand
- White Hack
- Advertiser
- White Hack
Laundry powder and cocaine look identical. Same colour. Same texture. Same suspicious little bag. Everyone knows it. Nobody ever said it. Especially not a detergent brand.
White Hack did. Because White Hack is a detergent that comes in sheets, not powder. No white powder. No confusion. And to prove the point, they hired the one person on earth for whom this was not a joke.
Stephen Baldwin. 27 years sober. A man so committed to avoiding white powder in any form that he stopped doing laundry entirely. With White Hack sheets, he could finally do both.
Baldwin posted. His family got involved. Reddit found it. Bored Panda covered it. The internet had opinions.
Nobody got arrested. Everybody got clean clothes.
