We name the creative leaders with the most gongs to their names from our Advertising Awards program.
We reveal the top-performing creative leaders in advertising categories from this year's Awards program
As The Drum Honors enters its final phase for 2025, we turn to the people behind the work that gathered most love from our judges (not to mention silverware) across our global awards program this year.
Today, we take a look at advertising categories, with a focus on creative leaders.
We’ve scoured credits lists and awards entries to see which creatives and other leaders were behind the most awarded campaigns of the year. Below, you’ll see full rankings for both chief creative officers (CCOs) and executive creative directors (ECDs) in our advertising categories – both of which see strong showings from specialist health agencies including Area 23 and Klick Health, reflecting the strength of those shops’ creative work.
Elsewhere in the credits data, those same shops are represented well across the board (the most awarded creative directors this year are Andrea Bistany and Amy Fortunato of Klick Health, followed closely by Diego Torgo of Area 23).
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In other disciplines, though, creatives from other agencies rose to the top of our rankings. Our most-awarded copywriter this year was Tilden Lincoln from Zulu Alpha Kilo. Tilden’s colleague Lizzie Cox ranked second in our analysis of performance by art directors, just behind Andrea Ferlauto of LePub Italy.
On the strategy side, a clear winner leads the pack: Ellie Peters of Dept, who has won two major awards this year.
You can check out the full rankings for CCOs and ECDs below – and check back in with The Drum Honors for more rankings in different disciplines.
| Rank | CCO | Agency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rich Levy | Klick Health |
| 2 | Tim Hawkey | Area 23 |
| 3 | Chris Birch & Jonny Parker | VCCP London |
| 4 | Bruno Bertelli, Cristiana Boccassini & Mihnea Gheorghiu | LePub |
| 5 | Nick Rees | Bulletproof |
| 6 | Tim Gordon | Zulu Alpha Kilo |
| 7= | Santiago Lucero | SAMY |
| 7= | Debbi Vandeven, Rafael Pitanguy & Graham Lang | VML/VML Canada |
| 7= | Andrew Keller | WPP Open X |
| 7= | Peter Khoury & Jerome Ooi | TBWA/TBWA Hong Kong |
| 7= | Russell Barrett | Juice (A Division of TBWA India) |
| 7= | Fernando Hidalgo | Joystick |
| Rank | ECD | Agency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bernardo Romero | Klick Health |
| 2 | Jason Graff & David Adler | Area 23 |
| 3 | Eoin Sherry & Gaston Soto | LePub Italy |
| 4 | Tim Jones | Klick Health |
| 5= | David Masterman | VCCP London |
| 5= | Antoine Bécotte & Frank Macera | VML Canada |
| 5= | Lynsey Atkin | 4Creative |
| 5= | Jeff Bowerman | Dept |
Want more? Check out all of the top winners from this year’s The Drum Honors, browse case studies of all the winning work from this year’s The Drum Awards festival and mark your calendar for February, when we’ll unveil 2026’s World Creative Rankings.