2020s ads

Advertising in the 2020s

The 2020s entries run to the present. So far, much of the best work is made for the internet or staged in the real world, and purpose remains central, though many entries prove it through action rather than claims.

The pandemic shaped the decade's opening. Dove's Courage Is Beautiful put the mask-marked faces of doctors and nurses on posters, and Heineken's shutter ads rented the shutters and facades of closed bars, so the media money went straight to bar owners.

Games became a medium in their own right. Reporters Without Borders built The Uncensored Library inside Minecraft so that banned journalism could reach readers where news sites are blocked, and Kiyan Prince, a QPR academy prospect stabbed at his school gates fifteen years earlier, became a playable footballer in FIFA 21, aged to 30.

The Super Bowl kept getting hacked. Reddit bought five seconds of airtime and filled them with a slide, too dense to read without pausing, explaining that it had spent its entire marketing budget on them; Coinbase showed nothing but a bouncing QR code; and DoorDash turned every other advertiser's spot into a prize.

Brands also changed what they sell and let that be the campaign. In Three Words, AXA France extended the emergency rehousing in its home insurance to cover domestic violence, and Renault built a peer-to-peer charging app. Meanwhile Duolingo's owl showed a brand behaving like a creator on TikTok, and Nike used machine learning to stage a match between two eras of Serena Williams.