World Creative Rankings 2025: Serviceplan’s Dennis Fritz named top creative director

Focusing on creative directors, Serviceplan Group creative director Dennis Fritz has come top in our ranking of 200 leaders in the field. Fritz worked on three of the top-20 most-awarded campaigns and three more that were in the top 200 most-awarded. The most successful of these campaigns was 855-How-to-quit-(opioids) for Anzen Health, which ranked as the seventh most successful campaign.

It’s a remarkable rise for Fritz, who last year ranked at 130 in the creative director list. In 2023, he was not ranked in the 2023 top 200 list at all.

The second most awarded creative director is Simon Dolsten, creative director at WPP's Johannes Leonardo. Before taking on his current role, Dolsten worked on Dreamcaster for Michelob in his previous role at FCB New York; that project has come top in the most awarded campaigns list. Dolsten also worked on the campaign that ranked 18th: Spreadbeats for Spotify.

The Dreamcaster project has been a big differentiator, also contributing to FCB New York creative director Thomas Mori’s third-place position in the table. Mori also worked on Lap of Legends for Michelob, which ranks at 41 in the most-awarded campaigns list.

Last year, Mori was joint second in the creative director table while fellow FCB creative director Alexandre Abrantes was top. This year, Abrantes placed fourth.

The World Creative Rankings is compiled over the course of a calendar year by carefully analyzing the performance of thousands of pieces of creative work across 24 major industry awards programs, including The Drum Marketing Awards and The Drum Awards Festival.

That data is then used to determine the people rankings – the CCOs, ECDs, creative directors, art directors and copywriters responsible for the most creatively-awarded work in 2024. Their companies are then ranked, with these rankings including the best agencies, networks and holding companies, which are also split by country and region.

The advertisers who fund the world’s most awarded work are also ranked, while the sectors that offer the richest return in creative gongs, whether that be Food & Drink, Automotive, Retail or Charity, are also evaluated.

Head over to our dedicated World Creative Rankings hub to see the full list of the most-awarded creative directors in the world, plus all of our other tables and breakdowns, as well as full details of the methodology that goes into the rankings.