How many marketing initiatives would improve by taking the same promotional budgets and redirect them from a tired mechanic into a real idea?

Usually when I post something like this, I add a line saying I have no vested interest. Not this time.

AskMaud is out in the world. It’s AdForum’s AI, sitting on top of the library they’ve been keeping since 1999. 200,000 campaigns, 50,000 agencies, 100+ award shows, 25 years of human curation. All of it now answers questions in plain language.

I’ve been involved since the early days. Not as a client, as one of the people poking at it. I tested it, argued with it, told the team when the answers were thin, and helped shape how it reads creative work rather than just data. Watching something go from rough demo to a product that actual advertising people want to use has been one of the most instructive things I’ve done this year.

The moment it clicked for me: I “asked Maud” to build a timeline of how mobile has been used in retail to drive sales. It came back with the evolution, the campaigns, the shift behind each one. Days of research, done in minutes. And it shows the work. Every opinionated answer links back to real campaigns, real agencies, real credits.

It’s good for pitches (find the perfect example that proves your point), competitive audits (see what the other brands in the category have actually made), and briefs (stop guessing, start from tangible references). It won’t have your idea for you. It ain’t a generation engine, we know how those tools go. But it gets you to the starting line faster and much better informed.

This year keeps doing this to me, pulling me from writing about the work into building the tools around it.

Which is why working on AskMaud made me look at this site differently. 1,500+ case studies sit in here, tagged, curated, written up one by one. The catch with any library is that you have to know what you’re looking for. I keep wondering what happens if this one could meet you halfway. I don’t have an answer yet and I’m in no rush to bolt AI onto something that finally works. But I’m thinking about it. If you have a view, use the Feedback link in the footer. I’d appreciate it.

Meanwhile, AskMaud is free to try. Log in with LinkedIn and ask her something hard. Worth a look.

PS: For the record, I’m quoted on their site. Make of that what you will.

The delivery app that can get you anything managed to get people ‘ordering’ their own custom Super Bowl commercial. Touched cultural moment, demo and conversion at the same time. 2026 Cannes Lions Media Grand Prix.

If your phone gets stolen, “what you gonna call with?” Wonderful when brands use all the creativity and leverage to bring real win-win-win solutions to life.

Bringing the product to where people crave for it most. The challenge of being an iconic brand is that people take you for granted.

How much luck a fan brings to the team? Poland’s football club turns superstition into incentives to draw footfall after an unlucky season.

What looks like a simple content idea at first sight hides a solid retail promotion beneath, merging storytelling, behaviour change and conversion.

Logo-on-the-pitch is the oldest sponsorship in football. But Mercado Livre turned the whole game into a promotion and the field into a check-out experience. 2026 Cannes Lions Outdoor Grand Prix.

Super Bowl ads get weird, but none weirder than delivering the actual commercial to a fan’s front door. Live. With Elijah Wood. The message was home delivery. So was the ad.

Restaurant chains beat independent bars because the same name means shared resources. Hundreds of Spanish bars already had the same name. Heineken recognised those namesakes as de-facto franchises and gave them equal benefits.

Beauty creators have been hacking Vaseline for years. The brand already verified which hacks work. This one asked who invented them. A 2008 blog post became a product and a new way of engaging your biggest fans was born. Credit where it’s due, two decades late. Just like Vaseline Verified, this one is on track to become one of the big winners this year.

With barely days short of the FIFA World Cup 2026 opening, Brazilian drinks powerhouse reunited 5 football legends to play together one more time. But this time, it’s music. Happening now, case study coming soon.

In 2014 Pope Francis rode through Bethlehem in a popemobile, built to protect one man. Before he died, he gave Caritas his blessing to turn it into a paediatric clinic for Gaza’s children. The most protected car in the world, sent to the children no one is protecting.

For the first time, Activation Ideas is a Knowledge Partner of an award show.

The show is Dragons of MENA, the new Middle East and North Africa edition of the Dragons of Asia. I’ve been asked plenty of times and have always said no. This site is here to share work, not to sell shows. This time I said yes.

Why? “Below the Line” disciplines and techniques deserve the kind of recognition mainstream advertising doesn’t give them. In an agency, these are the ideas often relegated to a few slides at the end of a presentation, cooked at the last minute. Or the flashy ones for award shows that get one-off attention rather making business impact.

I’ve felt that strongly from the start, when I moved from traditional advertising to the rising world of brand activation. Even now, with most shows running activation and experiential categories, the discipline still isn’t properly understood.

That’s why this site exists. And it’s why I’ll back a show that takes activation seriously.

I’ve entered and judged the original Dragons of Asia for about a decade. The reason I paid attention back then is the same reason I’m getting involved now. Since 2000, this has been the show talking about promotional marketing, activation and experiential as primary disciplines. The mainstream shows took years to catch up. Most of them still treat activation as a sidekick to advertising. The Dragons treat it as the main act. There is no global award show built around the full activation and promotional marketing discipline. This is the closest thing.

The MENA edition extends that thinking into a region with the same problem: strong work that doesn’t get seen on the world stage. Two of the ten categories are built specifically for the region: Nation, City & Place Impact, and Faith, Arabic Culture & Seasonal Communications. The show was built for MENA, not pasted on top of it. Judged equally on strategy, concept, execution and results by an international Jury. Entry is affordable and one submission covers both MENA and the Dragons of Asia.

This isn’t Cannes and isn’t trying to be. The work is judged on whether an idea worked in the real world, not on how it looks on a case film. That’s a different scale, and it’s the right one for this kind of campaign.

If you’re working in MENA, or you have activation ideas that deserve to be seen, worth a look. Deadline is 15 June 2026. Awards in Dubai in September.

I’ve been waiting for this my whole life. Genius.

Tiffany Blue® is a registered trademark. Nobody else can use it, in any industry. Except the oceans off Africa, Australia and the Caribbean already do. With that fact, the brand’s unnoticed conservation efforts took over the normally self-serving luxury ads sites.

Outdoor brands claim they have the gear to take you to the furthest places on Earth. But no one has gone as far as picking a social media fight with Flat Earthers, daring them to find the edge in exchange for the entire company. 2026 Cannes Lions Brand Experience & Activation Grand Prix.

Nothing kills a betting addiction. So Brazil’s stock exchange stopped trying to fight it and built a better bet instead. Same dopamine rush, real stocks, no financial loss.

The street furniture was always there. A pet insurer just labelled it. Cheaper than the vet bills it would otherwise be paying.

Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.