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D&AD Awards 2025

D&AD exists to stimulate, enable and award creative excellence in design and advertising.

Considered by many the world’s most prestigious benchmark for commercial creativity. The D&AD Pencil stands for rigour and integrity. Everything that it takes to make the best creative work.

Entries to the D&AD Awards 2025 have now closed. The shortlists will be announced on 20 & 21 May, with the winners announced at the Awards Ceremony on 22 May.

  • Get the entry kit
  • Categories
  • Judges
  • Key dates
  • Ceremony

Why enter D&AD Awards?

D&AD is an education charity that promotes and enables excellence in design and advertising. Each year, D&AD Awards gather the world's best creative work from across the commercial design, advertising, production and craft disciplines to be judged by more than 300 global creative leaders, practitioners and innovators.

Winning a D&AD Pencil will earn your work exposure to an audience of millions in the creative industries around the world through international press coverage, exhibitions, promotion on the D&AD website, social platforms, and newsletters, and the opportunity to be featured in D&AD content unpacking creative excellence within the D&AD Annual.

Don’t just take our word for it. Find out more about why you should enter here.
  • English

    Get the entry kit

    To learn more about categories, prices and all the information required for entering the awards, register or download the entry kit below.

    Download

  • 日本語

    D&AD賞 応募要項

    応募要項PDFをダウンロードするにはアカウント登録が必要です。

    Download

  • Español

    Premios D&AD 2025 pautas para los trabajos

    Deberás estar registrado para descargar la guía.

    Download

  • Português

    Prêmios D&AD 2025 guia de Inscrição

    Você precisará estar cadastrado para baixar o guia.

    Download

  • Français

    D&AD Awards 2025 Entry Kit

    Pour apprendre plus sur les catégories, prix, et toutes les informations requises pour le concours, enregistrer ou télécharger le guide ci-dessous.

    Download

  • 简体中文

    D&AD奖2025入门套件

    要了解更多有关类别，价格和参加奖项所需的所有信息，请在下面注册或下载

    Download

What's new?

  • Overview

    The D&AD Awards are constantly evolving, to ensure there’s a place for everyone to enter their best work.

    We frequently revise our categories and subcategories, so you may see some small adjustments as you look through the 2025 Entry Kit. Watch out for the ‘new’ symbols identifying key changes.

  • Branding as a Discipline

    The branding category had over 900 submissions in 2024 and as a result has become more challenging for jury members to judge. It has also been noted that smaller brand work rises to the top more frequently at D&AD in comparison to very large multinational brand work. As both are valid in the creative landscape, we wanted to ensure that both types of work can be awarded. We have decided to split Branding into two new categories, and put it in it’s own discipline: New Brand Identity and Brand Identity Refresh. Other key things to note:

    —We have added subcategories for Brand Strategy
    —We have added a new subcategory for the brands with over 50,000 employees and changed the scale on micro, small and medium enterprises
    —We have increased the eligibility window to 2 years to allow more big brand work to land/ be implemented, giving entrants options to hold off entry for an additional year if they wish
    —We are changing the way to ask for supporting information, allowing PDF uploads for concept or guidelines work to ensure there is a better understanding of what is implemented by brands and what is proof of concept/brand guideline work which may or may not be implemented in future

  • Creator Content & Digital Marketing

    The landscape of creativity and creative excellence is always changing, with a significant number of exciting new creatives no longer being designers or copywriters, but creators. We want to give these creatives their own space to be recognised and have introduced a Creator Content category for 2025.

    With this work previously recognised as subcategories across several other categories and in our Digital & Social Category (now Digital Marketing) we have separated Creator Content out in order to recognise the difference between top notch advertising for social, and the strategic use of the creativity of creators and influencers to deliver success for brands.

    You can also find ‘Use of Creator’ and ‘Use of Talent’ subcategories in the following categories: Casting, Entertainment, Experiential, Media and PR. Creators and Influencers are those with more niche audiences, who’s fame is born from their creativity and success creating content. They secure high engagement by collaborating with brands that align with their own values, and the content is produced and posted by them to their channels. Talent includes celebrities who are already well-known, and use their fame to influence their audiences on platforms.

  • Retired categories

    Collaborative was a special award that celebrates long-lasting relationships between clients, agencies and production companies that have resulted in consistently inspiring creative outputs over time. Although we still believe the ethos of the Collaborative Award remains true, the industry feedback suggested it was hard to enter and judge true collaboration so we have chosen to retire the category for now. 

    Following the introduction of Creative Transformation in 2022, we’ve seen some great entries and winners, however the category raised many questions from judges and entrants. Having reviewed the submissions for the past few years, we noticed that the majority of submissions were entered into multiple categories, and that many entries aligned with brand strategy. 

    So with the reshaping of the branding categories to include and recognise Brand Strategy we’ve decided to retire the Creative Transformation category and steer those true brand transformational and strategic work to the branding juries.

  • What else is new?

    Please look at the entry kit for information on the following new subcategories:

    Cinematography / 15 Seconds & Under Direction / 15 Seconds & Under 
    Editing / 15 Seconds & Under Production Design / 15 Seconds & Under
    Editing / Trailers & Teasers
    Gaming & Virtual Worlds / Trailers
    Gaming & Virtual Worlds / Audio-Visual Craft
    Health & Wellbeing / Animated
    Pharma / Animated
    Luxury / Branding
    Photography / Editorial
    Digital Design / UI in Motion

    Watch out for the ‘new’ symbols identifying key changes in the 2025 Entry Kit.

  • Ad Net Zero

    D&AD are supporters of Ad Net Zero, committed to decarbonising the advertising industry and promoting sustainable consumer behaviour change. In order to help understand the level of commitment and progress towards net zero targets D&AD joined other Ad Net Zero supporters in 2024 to ask whether agencies and brands have science-based Net Zero targets in place.

    For 2025, we’re continuing to ask these questions along with additional project-related questions to help further our understanding of the progress of the world’s best creative work.

    Submitting this information is mandatory but is for research purposes only. Your response will not be passed on to the judges or affect your eligibility for the awards.

Everything you need to know

Have a question about your entry?

Most questions can be answered by checking our dedicated FAQs page. If you still need to speak to someone, you can call the Awards team on +44 (0) 207 840 1111. Lines are open from 9.30–5.30pm GMT.
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2025 Categories

D&AD Ceremony

The award that makes creative careers. The ultimate standard of excellence.

D&AD Awards Ceremony takes place on Thursday 22 May, awarding the very best in global creativity.

  • Buy tickets

Explore all 2025 judges by jury

Key dates 2025

Get in touch

UK, IRE & Northern Europe

North America

Keka Kukui'o'kalani Schermerhorn
keka@dandad.org
Christian Santiago​
​christian.santiago@dandad.org

​Asia, Middle East and Africa

Katherine Chen
katherine.chen@dandad.org
+44 (0)7752 502 545
​WeChat 微信 Dandadawards

Japan & Singapore

Kotoko Koya
kotoko.koya@dandad.org
+81 90 4736 5965

Central & Southern Europe/Latam

Pablo Aör Brandao
pablo.brandao@dandad.org
+44 (0)7903 259 626

​General Enquiries

D&AD Awards Team
awards@dandad.org
+44 (0) 207 840 1111

Press

Enquiries
press@dandad.org

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