A-list Awards 2020

Given the state of the world, the arrival of our annual Ad Age A-List issue arguably couldn’t be better timed.

This package is a celebration of the best our industry served up in 2019. Cannes may be canceled and the Clios pushed back until next year. (Ad Age’s own awards gala was to have been last week, but it’s also on hold.) Still, we can salute the good work and talented folks who make this industry so special, so creative. In these pages you’ll find the people, brands and agencies who inspired and moved us last year—and they are the people, brands and agencies who will lead the industry forward through this plague. Even if some of their jobs have since fallen victim to COVID-19.

For the third consecutive year, Wieden+Kennedy tops the list for its category-defining work for Nike, for cultivating Ford as a client, for winning McDonald’s while maintaining KFC. For the work.

It boils down to a simple ethos: “Rules get broken,” as Colleen DeCourcy, co-president and global chief creative officer, tells I-Hsien Sherwood in his piece about our first-ever A-List three-peat.

Since this year is also a nice big round number, it provides us with the additional opportunity to anoint the Agency of the Decade, Droga5, in this case another rule-breaker which has had one hell of a run—culminating in its sale to Accenture, news that broke during last year’s A-List photo shoot.

If ever we needed a time for some positive narratives, it’s now. There will be no “returning” to life as it was, as Jason DeLand, co-founding partner of Anomaly recently said. “This is an opportunity to bounce forward.”

It’s time not only to break rules; we as a collective whole have a unique opportunity to totally rewrite them.