Why we're awarding two Best of Shows at this year's Brand Impact Awards

For the first time in almost a decade, there are two Best of Show Awards at the Brand Impact Awards.

Why? Because we feel it’s important to acknowledge, at the highest level of the scheme, that the DNA of a high-impact campaign and a beautiful-yet-robust identity system, built for longevity, are fundamentally different.

And when pitting them directly against each other for a Best of Show accolade, the wow factor and rich in-the-moment storytelling of the former cannot be easily compared to the rigour and craft of the latter.

A tale of two streams

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At the inaugural BIAs way back in 2014, entries were formally sorted into two ‘streams’. We called them branding programmes and branded campaigns, and they were considered independently: two roomfuls of in-person judges was each tasked with determining a set of category winners, and a Best of Show.

As the scheme developed, these streams became increasingly intertwined. With no set number of trophies in any given category, world-class campaigns and identities could happily both win Gold alongside each other – and we could draw on a rich blend of cross-sector judging expertise for each category, rather than splitting our panel in half.

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2015 was the last time we had two Best of Show Awards, with Johnson Banks’ striking campaign for UNICEF UK taking the top prize alongside The Partners’ ingenious identity for the Tusk Conservation Awards.

One project to rule them all

Since then, for the most part one Best of Show emerged naturally and conclusively from one stream or another with near-unanimous acclaim from the panel – Johnson Banks took it again in 2016 with its thought-provoking campaign for the University of Cambridge, following by three wins in a row for The Partners and its post-merger successor Superunion, with London Symphony Orchestra (another campaign), Elliptic and BBC Two (both identity systems).

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Over this time, Best of Show at the Brand Impact Awards naturally evolved into a singular thing: the very best project in contention that year, regardless of its wider context or from which stream it originated.

When lockdown forced us to shift to remote judging in 2020, we took the opportunity to expand our once primarily London-based panel around the world. As well as unlocking a richer and more diverse bank of expertise, we also re-thought the judging process. In place of two distinct judging rooms, one large global panel that could split into smaller, specialist groups as and when needed.

A bone of contention

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2020 was also the year that Uncommon Creative Studio’s arresting Britain Get Talking campaign for ITV, our unanimous Social Impact winner, took the Best of Show accolade – but only after a fierce debate about its merits relative to double-Gold winner All Watched Over, a complex, poetic, thought-provoking identity system by Accept & Proceed and Thomas Sharp.

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Three brand identities went on to take the top prize in succession.

It was unanimous to award COLLINS’ dynamic scheme for San Francisco Symphony in 2021, but subsequent years again saw close-run fights between an identity and a campaign: Seed Library by Magpie Studio clinched it against Superunion’s Surreal Island campaign for China Duty Free in 2022, and Veg NI by Jack Renwick Studio narrowly triumphed against ManvsMachine’s Make The Next campaign for Squarespace in 2023.

Our new direction

Compared to those early years of the BIAs, the global spread of the panel – and the intense rigour of the judging process, which includes a three-week independent review period following by small-group discussions to determine the final winners – ensures every project submitted gets the scrutiny it deserves from a broad cross-section of branding experts.

So with all the above in mind, when faced with another chalk-and-cheese ultra-close voting battle between a campaign and an identity system in 2024, the time felt right to reintroduce two Best of Show Awards, rewarding the best in each respective ‘stream’ for the first time since 2015.

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So congratulations to both ManvsMachine and Jones Knowles Ritchie for your world-class work for Samsung (campaign) and RSPCA (identity). We look forward to rewarding the very best in branding, in all its forms, for many more years to come at the BIAs.

Browse all the Brand Impact Awards 2024 winners here.