Trends: How breaking category conventions helps brands stand out
Image of Your Way Out by Isle of Any for Coinbase, which won two Black Pencils in 2026
Breaking Category Codes, a trend identified by D&AD in our 2026 Trend Report, shows how brands are becoming confident enough to explore beyond the limits of where they’re expected to play. Brands that are achieving this are demonstrating an awareness of the market they sit within but, more importantly, a willingness to transcend its rules.
With research estimating that people recall as few as 1% of the ads they’re exposed to each day, it’s essential for brands to distinguish themselves from others around them, which helps to explain why some are beginning to lean into. Plus, with job roles becoming hybridised and the worlds of entertainment, politics and brands, it’s perhaps natural that the cues informing creative work are blurring just as much.
Category tropes aren’t simply being ignored; they’re becoming a launchpad for bold new ideas. The Periodic Fable, a 2025 campaign created by Uncommon Creative Studio, positioned The Ordinary as an outlier among other skincare and beauty brands, confidently sidestepping the usual aspirational sheen of beauty advertising and embracing a nightmarish vision of the industry instead. The film digested the beauty fads and myths that regularly spread across social media, and used these to reflect the ugly truth back at the industry, highlighting the importance of The Ordinary’s focus on clinical science over nonsense claims.
"Category tropes aren’t simply being ignored; they’re becoming a launchpad for bold new ideas."
Some brands are achieving this by turning elsewhere for inspiration, from adjacent categories to wildly oppositional ones. For Coinbase’s 2026 spot Your Way Out, creative agency Isle of Any and director Oscar Hudson settled on an approach that belonged to early 2000s video games rather than the cryptocurrency sector. Yet the choice wasn’t just about disrupting the visual status quo. With its flat, boxy structures and mechanical movement, the format responded directly to the tired, restrictive financial sector that it is positioning itself against.
In both cases, the brands needed to know their own sector intimately in order to understand how to do the opposite. This is about experimenting. Ask what it would look like to channel a brand or product through the lens of a completely different genre or context, from a horror film to children’s storybook. For categories that are considered “dry”, there is even more room for surprise and subversion.
To learn more about this trend and others shaping the future of advertising and design, read the D&AD Trend Report 2026 in full.