Best campaigns of the last decade

Whether you have felt like the past ten years have flown or crept by, you have no doubt experienced a decade's worth of change and innovation. As we march head-on into 2020, we asked five industry leaders and D&AD Masterclass trainers to revisit their favourite campaigns from the last decade.

The genius of Fearless Girl is that, like C4’s brilliant repositioning of Paralympians as Superhumans, it leapfrogs all the pitfalls. Effortlessly.

In one word - ‘Fearless’ - it positions women as superior. So much better than legions of other words that could have been chosen: “As good as...”; “Equal too”; “Qualified”; “Underrated”; ‘Marginalised”; “Discriminated against”; “Really quite accomplished” and so on. 

McCann New York and sculptor Kristen Visbal’s bronze cast has generated eye-watering statistics. More than $7.5 million of free publicity according to Apex News, reported on Bloomberg. 4.6 billion Twitter impressions in the first 12 weeks. Two thousand five hundred signatures were gathered in the first 24 hours for a petition to keep the statue in place for longer than a week. (They were petitioning to support an ad, for a global hedge fund. Many thousands more lent their names, and she stayed up for over a year.)

When first installed, Fearless Girl was one of only six statues to women in the New York metropolitan area. Duplicate statues followed in Oslo, Melbourne and London. By demand.