Each year B&T sees plenty of campaigns designed to make the world a better place. This list isn’t about those.
Across adland there’s a smaller group who don’t stop at the brief, they show up for causes when awards aren’t there to be won.
In this Best of the Best list, we’re putting the spotlight on those people. The leaders from across the industry who have actively and deliberately created change that goes beyond themselves and the industry — whether this change was be created through advertising and marketing executions or otherwise.
In forthcoming Best of the Bests, we’ll be looking at the top Project Managers, Recruiters and Directors. If you know who should be included: nominate them now for B&T’s Best of the Best!
But now, onto the Best of the Best Social Changemakers. And if we’re honest, everyone on this list should be #1.
10. Phoebe Sloane, creative director, Bullfrog; founder, The Aunties
Phoebe Sloane’s push for change in 2026 hasn’t stopped at the industry’s own doorstep. In May, she led Bullfrog’s ‘Costumes for a Cause’ for AIA Australia’s Mother’s Day Classic partnership. It was a community-led storytelling project pairing five people whose lives have been shaped by breast and ovarian cancer with designers, turning their personal stories into bespoke costumes made to be seen and shared. It’s exactly the kind of work that raises awareness and funds, not just polishing the industry’s own reputation.
That instinct isn’t new. Since founding The Aunties in 2021, Sloane has built a support network for women and gender-diverse people in creative industries into a 4,500-strong community, backed by its own mentor training resource, Support Talk and Auntie Intel, a tool monitoring how women in the industry are actually feeling.
Sloane doesn’t separate any of it from her day job. Founding a movement, mentoring at scale and now directing work built around real people’s lived experience are, in her words, leadership principles, not side projects.
Few people on this list are proving in 2026 that creative skill can serve causes well beyond the industry that trained it.
9. Louise Wilson & Lauren Thornborough, co-founders, The Village
Louise Wilson and Lauren Thornborough spent the back half of 2025 turning a support network into a media property in its own right.
In August of 2025, they launched ‘It Takes a Village,’ a podcast produced with Mamamia giving media parents a platform to talk openly about deadlines, client wins and family life without the usual gloss. The podcast ran through to 2026, closing its run with guests including Katie and Michael Levine (head of marketing & communications at Australian Multicultural Community Services and head of APAC at Uber Advertising, respectively) for a candid conversation on modern parenthood, one of ten episodes built entirely around honest, unscripted conversations about balancing a media career with raising a family.
They also launched The Village’s first Melbourne event, expanding a Sydney-born initiative into a national community. oOh!media renewed as foundational partner for a second year, with PubMatic joining as a new commercial backer.
None of it is incidental to the day job. Wilson and Thornborough built The Village because they lived the problem themselves, and every milestone since, the podcast, the new city, the new partners, has been aimed at the same goal: making sure the industry doesn’t quietly lose its most experienced people the moment they become parents. Through their work, they’ve changed the lives of children around the country.
8. Jasmin Bedir, founder Fck the cupcakes & Yeah The Pies!, CEO, Innocean
Jasmin Bedir built Fck The Cupcakes on a simple line: less icing, more action. The organisation’s founding belief is that gender inequality can’t be solved without bringing men into the conversation because it’s not just a women’s issue but a human one.
Yeah The Pies! has kept that mission running well past its original International Women’s Day launch, staying open to any man willing to show up and cook while unpacking gender bias and masculinity, aimed squarely at the “movable middle” who are open to progress but unsure where to start.
In May 2026, Bedir pushed the conversation into a new format entirely, launching The Fck It List on the Nova Podcasts network alongside co-hosts Carly Pelham and Jen Dobbie.
The show puts years of off-mic conversation on the record, debating everything from impossible beauty standards to the algorithms shaping how women live. Bedir’s goal was never to retreat quietly, but turn up the volume when it would be easier to go quiet.
Five years on from a single frustrated idea, Bedir is, by her own admission, still tired. But she’s turned that fatigue into something louder, funnier and hard to ignore.
7. Nikyah Hutchings, executive producer, commercial & sponsored content, NITV
Nikyah Hutchings’s day job already reaches well past the ad industry. As NITV’s first-ever executive producer of commercial and sponsored content, she designs briefs and embeds cultural safety standards into every commercial partnership NITV runs. But the part of her work that lands directly with the Australian public is what she does on-screen.
She voices a weekly national weather segment that centres Indigenous knowledge systems, putting First Nations understanding of Country in front of a mainstream broadcast audience that would otherwise never encounter it.
She also contributes to SBS’s Australia Explained series, helping migrants and new arrivals make sense of Australian life and systems.
Since 2025, she’s been an ambassador for Epilepsy Action Australia, lending her platform to a health cause with no connection to media or advertising at all.
Hutchings has lived with epilepsy since childhood and as an ambassador for Epilepsy Action Australia, lends her platform to reduce stigma and build better support for people with epilepsy, particularly in First Nations, rural and regional communities
Hutchings believes that representation in front of the camera isn’t enough. First Nations people need to be in the room where decisions get made and she’s spent not only the past year but the majority of her career, proving that visibility is the first step to real change. This isn’t the first time we’ve recognised the importance of Hutchings’ work — she won the Grand Prix at B&T’s 30 Under 30 Awards earlier this year.
6. Ian Perrin, managing director, SPEED
Ian Perrin has spent the past year turning his own grief into an industry-wide conversation. In early 2025, he and SPEED launched Keep Talking, a fundraising and awareness project for Lifeline born out of the loss of his father to suicide.
The initiative spun off into an ongoing B&T editorial series of the same name, giving prominent industry figures a platform to share their own personal struggles, one that has continued running monthly into 2026.
The response has surprised even Perrin. What started as a single raw admission has grown into more than $70,000 raised for Lifeline, alongside speeches and presentations at events keeping the conversation going with the help of his team at SPEED.
Perrin has taken the cause further still, running ultra-marathon distances to fundraise, with colleagues and friends publicly rallying behind both the physical challenge and what it represents.
Perrin runs SPEED on the philosophy of letting the work speak for itself, no awards chasing, no vanity metrics. Keep Talking is the exception he’s made loudly and deliberately, because for him staying quiet isn’t an option.
5. Nina Funnell, freelance journalist
Journalist, author and sexual assault survivor advocate Nina Funnell continues to lead the charge on victim gag-law reform. In the past 12 month, she has been a pioneer in the media industry on the matter, publishing a number of landmark investigation including the progress and shortcomings of Australia’s victim identification laws, documenting a survivor’s decades-long fight to finally speak publicly about the abuse inflicted by her father and exposing the ongoing legal restrictions that continue to silence rape survivors nationwide.
Funnell created the #LetHerSpeak campaign in 2018 after discovering victim gag-laws in Tasmania and the Northern Territory that prevented sexual assault survivors from speaking publicly about their own experiences, even using their own names. The campaign, which she runs in partnership with Marque Lawyers, News Corp, RASARA and End Rape on Campus Australia, has since overturned laws in Tasmania, the Northern Territory and Victoria that had prevented survivors from publicly identifying themselves.
The work has been widely recognised by her peers. In 2020, Funnell won the Walkley Award for Public Service Journalism and the Walkley Our Watch Award. In 2021, B&T named her Journalist of the Year at the Women in Media Awards for her #LetHerSpeak investigative series.
She has spent more than a decade in the sexual violence prevention and advocacy space and served on the boards of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, the NSW Premier’s Council on Preventing Violence Against Women and RASARA, End Rape On Campus Australia She has also trained NRL players on sex, consent and respectful relationships.
Funnell holds a United Nations Media Australia Award (2017) and an Australian Human Rights Commission Community Award (2010) for her work in sexual violence prevention, and is an ambassador for the Full Stop Foundation.
4. Dylan Alcott, co-founder, The Dylan Alcott Foundation; Priya Addams Williams, lead, Shift 20
Alcott could easily coast on his legacy: a golden slam, Australian of the Year, a career most people would call finished business. Instead, alongside Priya Addams Williams, he’s spent the past year pushing Shift 20; their initiative to push for genuine disability representation in Australian advertising.
Nearly 20 per cent of Australians live with disability, yet representation in mainstream advertising sits at under 1 per cent. Closing that gap is the mission Alcott set out to solve and the one Addams Williams has made her full-time focus since joining the Foundation from Special Group to lead Shift 20 in 2024.
In December, the pair partnered with PHD and Special to launch 80 for 20, a program where major media owners, including Amazon, Foxtel, News, Nine, TikTok and Seven, commit up to 20 per cent added-value media space to any brand casting inclusively of disability, regardless of who their agency is.
Under their stewardship, the initiative has picked up wins across Effies, AWARD Awards, D&AD, Spikes Asia and B&T, plus three Cannes Lions shortlists. The Foundation’s other flagship event, Ability Fest, also returned this year with fresh brand backing, continuing to fund scholarships, sports programs and entrepreneurial pathways for young Australians with disability.
As a pair, Alcott and Addams Williams aren’t just asking the industry to include people with disabilities. They’ve built the incentives to make it stick.
3. Paul Nunnari, founder, Inclusively Made
Paul Nunnari has spent the past twelve months turning disability representation from a checkbox into an industry standard with real numbers attached.
In December 2025, Inclusively Made’s annual Foundation Partners Roundtable revealed that certified productions had contributed over $500,000 in paid employment for people with disability across mentee and crew roles in 2025 alone, with 67 productions certified, 64 casting people with disability and 943 total days of employment created. New foundation partners KFC, Mastercard, Stan, Atomic 212° and Entertainment Partners joined the fold to keep that momentum building into 2026.
He’s also pushed the standard into new territory. In May, Nunnari and Thinkerbell launched Inclusivelymade.ai, a free tool that lets creatives sense-check ideas for disability representation from the moment a concept is dreamed up, designed to stop AI-generated work from defaulting to a non-disabled world before a single frame is produced.
Nunnari has been direct about what’s still holding brands back. It’s not malice, but fear of getting it wrong and not knowing where to start.
With blue-chip partners from Bupa to Woolworths now measuring inclusion as seriously as reach or recall, Nunnari has spent the last twelve months proving that the gap is closing.
2. Philippa Moig, CEO, UnLtd
Phillipa Moig marked just over a year as CEO at UnLtd and the milestones have kept stacking up. In her first six months, she reflected on visits from Armidale to Lake Cargelligo to Dubbo, sitting with young people who’d lived through trauma, homelessness and violence, the kind of grounding that’s shaped how she’s led ever since.
That leadership showed up most visibly this June, when Moig, alongside B&T’s very own Oliver Cerovic & David Hovenden, again took part in UnLtd’s Adland Bail Out, spending a night behind bars to support the Raise the Age NSW campaign.
The event raised more than $151,000, UnLtd’s biggest Bail Out yet. She’s been direct about what the industry is uniquely positioned to do about it, calling on the same skills used to sell products to instead sell awareness and drive real behaviour change.
Under her watch, UnLtd’s footprint keeps widening too, from a new Reconciliation Action Plan accredited this year to fresh board appointments and new fundraising formats like the Club UnLtd DJ nights, all feeding back into the org’s 27 charity partners.
A year in, Moig has undeniably driven consistent and visible momentum.
1. Rochelle Courtenay, founder, Share The Dignity
Rochelle Courtenay started by collecting pads and tampons from her personal training clients and driving them to local shelters. More than a decade later, Share the Dignity works with roughly 4,000 partner charities across the country, has distributed millions of period products, and was part of the campaign that got the GST removed from tampons and pads.
The past twelve months followed the same pattern. In November 2025, Share the Dignity launched its biggest ‘It’s in the Bag’ appeal yet, calling for 150,000 donated bags of essential items for women fleeing domestic violence or facing homelessness this Christmas.
Courtenay has said demand from the charity’s partners is rising faster than donations can keep up. This year’s campaign added two new ways to give: Dignity First Aid Kits and a “Decorate to Donate” workshop at Bunnings stores nationwide.
Courtenay’s goal now is full menstrual equity in Australia by 2030. Given what Share the Dignity has already built from a single truck boot, it’s not an unreasonable target.
For that, Rochelle Courtenay was named B&T’s 2025 Women in Media Social Changemaker, and tops this year’s list.
