Spikes Asia unveils its 2024 Creativity Report

Spikes Asia, APAC’s leading platform for creative excellence and effectiveness, has published its annual Creativity Report, which reveals the 2024 Agency of the Year by market. The report available to all, shines a light on the best creative work, as selected by Spikes juries, and includes the expanded rankings for this year’s top-performing networks, agencies and companies from the region.

Highlights from the 2024 rankings include Ogilvy securing the top rank across three markets, India, Mainland China and Malaysia, and Leo Burnett across two for the Philippines and Taiwan. Choojai and Friends took the lead for Thailand, the only independent agency to rank for Agency of the Year by Market across the Awards.

Agency of the Year by Market were as follows:

• Australia: VML, Melbourne
• India: Ogilvy, Mumbai
• Japan: Dentsu Inc., Tokyo
• Mainland China: Ogilvy, Shanghai
• Malaysia: Ogilvy, Kuala Lumpur
• New Zealand: DDB New Zealand, Auckland
• The Philippines: Leo Burnett, Manila
• Singapore: BLKJ HAVAS, Singapore
• South Korea: Cheil Worldwide, Seoul
• Taiwan: Leo Burnett, Taipei
• Thailand: Choojai and Friends, Bangkok

The themes covered in the Report include 'Enhance and enable with AI'—reflective of the increased number of companies using AI in the creative process. Entries using AI more than doubled year on year, from 331 in 2023 to 672 in 2024.

This year’s Spikes winners challenged and shifted mindsets to help tackle Asia’s most urgent briefs, including sustainability and gender bias. A prominent theme proved how brands needed to build connections through culture—winning work showed how brands had understood culture and the nuances of different platforms and social memes, so they had the best chance of connecting with audiences. Another theme was the revival of humour. Spikes winners showed how a light touch, satire and spinning a flaw into a feature can engage new audiences and increase profit margins.

Finally, work this year saw a new approach to immersive entertainment—gamification, technology and craft were used to involve audiences in engaging brand-led experiences.

Speaking about the Report, Simon Cook, CEO, Lions, said: “We’re delighted to release the 2024 Spikes Asia Creativity Report and reflect on this year’s Awards, which show the brilliant diversity of Asian creativity along with the region’s local cultural nuances. It’s an exciting time for creativity in APAC, and it’s inspiring to see the region’s commitment to creativity. I’d like to congratulate all shortlisted and winning work for setting the creative benchmark for another year.”

Jaime Ng, festival director, Spikes Asia, added: “The Spikes Asia Creativity Report provides the official, expanded rankings for this year’s top-performing networks, agencies and companies from across the region, and we’re excited to be able to share this with our APAC community. The themes and trends in the Report reflect how APAC continues to be a creative powerhouse and the many specialisms that have emerged from the body of the winning work, such as AI, gaming, well-being and humour. A huge thank you to our jurors for their expertise in setting the creative benchmark in APAC.”

The rankings are compiled using data from Spikes-winning and shortlisted work from 2024. The Spikes Asia Creativity Report is powered by Lions' intelligence platform, The Work, housing the world’s most extraordinary creative thinking with insights into how it was briefed, researched, produced and crafted. The Report is an essential tool for benchmarking creative excellence and effectiveness for the year ahead, sharing analysis and insights from the winning work and lessons on how brands are growing businesses and tackling some of the region’s most challenging problems in innovative ways.

Access the full report for free here. All results for the Spikes Asia Awards can be found here.