The B&T Awards Grand Prix normally goes to a traditional ad agency.
But in 2024, things are different. It’s fair to say that plenty of agencies could have taken home our famously weighty gold trophy this year. But consumers and the market are changing—digital and experiential are arguably far more important in the eyes of modern consumers than a beautifully crafted TVC and a sprawling media plan. Connection matters more than exposure.
Akcelo, through beautiful foresight, has put itself on the right side of these shifting sands.
Its brand experience services model spans digital products, services, platforms and commerce; physical brand and spatial interactions; and strategy, creative, social and content. As a result, it creates work for huge clients—McDonald’s, TikTok, Asahi, Tinder and PepsiCo, to name but five—that delivers massive results.
It has created huge activations for the likes of Macca’s and Salesforce. It delivered a sprawling end-to-end campaign for Gatorade, which hit every single part of the brand experience. It has delivered bespoke media at remarkable speed for Spotify as part of its yearly ‘Unwrapped’ campaign. It has turned McDonald’s Monopoly campaign from a seasonal sales booster into its biggest annual sales driver. It even created a recruitment brand platform that saw more than 25,000 staff join the chain in just three months.
During the judging period, it also picked up work for Carnival, Petcademy, Playstation, Bluestone, Beam Suntory, Gold Coast Airport, Anytime Fitness, Unlabelled, Chatime, Epic Games, Red Bull and Disney+, as well as the aforementioned Salesforce.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Akcelo has hundreds, if not thousands, of staff across its four offices in Melbourne, London, Vancouver and its home office in Sydney’s Redfern. But it doesn’t—around 130 at the last count.
Instead, Akcelo works differently with a “follow-the-sun” model that helps it service clients in 26 countries around the world with teams in LA, Nashville and Amsterdam, as well as its four main offices. As a result, it can work for 60 hours a week over six days, giving projects unmatchable momentum and speed without losing quality or burning out staff in any location. It has a 50:50 gender split among leadership roles and offers industry-leading parental leave. Heck, the staff even get Friday afternoons off every fortnight. And it’s Carbon Neutral.
If you thought advertising was in a tough place, perhaps you haven’t been thinking about it right. Akcelo has.