MarTech » Performance Marketing » Facebook Gives Top Creative Awards To Ice Bucket Challenge, Always’ “Like a Girl” Campaigns

Facebook Gives Top Creative Awards To Ice Bucket Challenge, Always’ “Like a Girl” Campaigns

Facebook picks year's top Facebook and Instagram campaigns from 2,700 entries and more than 160 countries.

Martin Beck on June 15, 2015 at 4:16 pm | Reading time: 3 minutes

Facebook announced its fourth annual creative awards today, giving top honors to two campaigns that didn’t seem like advertising.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and the Always “Like a Girl” campaign each received Facebook’s highest creative honor, the Blue Award. The Ice Bucket Challenge won the Blue for Good award for charitable and nonprofit organizations, after reaching more people than any Facebook event other than the 2014 FIFA World Cup and raising more than $220 million for ALS-related charities. The Always campaign, produced by Leo Burnett, drove home the point that doing something “like a girl” shouldn’t be considered an insult; in fact, sometimes it’s an advantage.

Neither were traditional advertising, which is the point Facebook is emphasizing with its annual creativity awards, timed to coincide with next week’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The message: the most effective advertising on Facebook and Instagram is unique.

“The way brands build on Facebook and Instagram has evolved from last year, because people have evolved,” Facebook chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy said in a Facebook blog post. “We are building for where people are, not for where they were.”

The winning entries were picked by jury of 18 Facebook and advertising industry executives from a pool of 2,700 submissions from 160 countries. That’s nearly 50% more entries from twice as many countries in years past, Facebook said. And befitting the surge of Facebook video, 70% of the entries were video based.

Here’s the full list of award winners: