B2B Advertising Awards 2025 entries reveal a pointy rise in brand-led, high-impact artistic work.
Entries to the ‘Finest use of artistic’ class present the most important year-on-year soar, with price range allocation information displaying a reallocation from media to artistic/manufacturing.
Artistic is the massive winner from the B2B Advertising Awards 2025, with the variety of entries into the ‘Finest use of artistic’ class rising by nearly 25% year-on-year, and from the start line of already being a preferred class.
This maybe stunning determine comes at a time when B2B artistic goes by a interval of AI-driven transformation, with gen AI platforms impacting positively and negatively on all types of B2B artistic, and the people accountable for them.
You could be forgiven for anticipating commoditisation of artistic, quite than its elevation, however this doesn’t appear to have been the case.
One other class that faired (maybe surprisingly) nicely within the entries this yr was ‘Finest services or products launch’, which noticed 100% improve in entries from 2024.
It’s attainable that this class was artificially deflated final yr, when it confirmed a decline, however it’s additionally attainable that firms are recognising difficult financial occasions to launch disruptive new choices to shake up markets and classes.
Finest use of buyer perception, Finest use of thought management, finest restricted price range marketing campaign and Finest use of ABM additionally noticed modest will increase in entries.
Model versus demand?
Two classes which have been the topic of a lot dialogue in B2B circles lately, however remained flat by way of entry numbers this yr, have been ‘Finest model initiative’ and ‘Finest use of demand technology’.
Entries centered on model declined by a single submission yr on yr, even if we break up this class into two (small and huge price range campaigns).
In the meantime, finest use of demand technology was flat yr on yr. Arguably the hype and arguments round whether or not B2B entrepreneurs needs to be sustaining funding demand technology or placing all their eggs into the model basket have counted for little or no in actuality.
Elsewhere, the most important single decline in entries was within the ‘Finest use of media’ class, however there was additionally a decline in entries to the ‘Finest omnichannel marketing campaign’ class.
It could be affordable to imagine that what’s behind each these developments is marketing campaign spending being reigned in attributable to constraints being utilized to price range due a discount in confidence.
Which may clarify a discount within the variety of channels getting used and a consequent discount in omnichannel entries. Nonetheless, perplexingly each common marketing campaign budgets and common channels used confirmed a year-on-year improve – the previous by a frankly astonishing one third, and the latter by 10%.
When mixed with a small total discount in entries, this means that manufacturers could also be investing extra in fewer campaigns (maybe pushed partly by inflation consuming into flat advertising budgets), with a recognition of upper stakes for fulfillment, aligned with larger professionalism of entrepreneurs inside each consumer and company groups.
Complexity round channel and platform integration and rising expectations for seamless CX may additionally be consuming into prices. A number of different attention-grabbing info referring to budgets:
- Budgets for middle-tier campaigns have risen most importantly
- The common marketing campaign price range in 2025 was £164k versus £100k in 2024
- The proportion of price range allotted to media has declined, whereas the allocation to artistic and manufacturing has elevated.
- £100k seems to have develop into the brand new default baseline for marketing campaign funding, with a lot of entries hovering simply above this stage.
That is the primary in a collection of articles that I’ll be doing on developments we will see from entries into the B2B Advertising Awards, and the Elevation Awards, which is B2B Advertising’s US-centric awards programme.
