Spikes Asia Week is here, and the race for Asia’s top creative honours is officially on.
Shortlists for 17 of the 25 categories are already out, with entries from 27 markets across the region—testament to the breadth and diversity of creative thinking emerging across APAC.
Here at Campaign Asia, the editorial team has been spotlighting our picks for the work we believe will reign supreme at the Festival.
Enjoy, and may the best ideas win!
Matthew Keegan
Data journalist, Campaign Red
Campaign: Hong Kong: The most fun per square kilometre
Brand / Agency: Cathay Group, Leo
Category: Creative Strategy
As tourism campaigns go, this one from Cathay Pacific takes a fresh angle, showcasing just how much you can do per square kilometre in Hong Kong. It’s a smart, data-driven approach, filled with punchy facts. Mong Kok boasts over 300 foodie finds per sq km, while Causeway Bay packs in more than 400 shopping spots. By quantifying the city’s experiences, the campaign cleverly plays the 'quantity game' without feeling overloaded. The use of numbers makes the scale of Hong Kong’s offerings immediately clear, and breaking up the content into short social videos makes perfect strategic sense. Altogether, it’s a well-thought-out campaign that cleverly turns data into desire.
Campaign: Don’t let a car change who you are
Brand / Agency: Federal Government of Australia, BMF
Category: Creative Strategy
With Australia facing a road fatality crisis, deaths rising for the fourth consecutive year to their highest level in over five years, the federal government’s campaign tackles risky driving behaviours by reframing them in everyday settings. If you wouldn’t tailgate, cut in line, or rush strangers on the street, why do it behind the wheel? By portraying these actions in non-driving contexts, from a man glued to his phone as his shopping trolley veers off course to pedestrians jostling each other on the footpath, the campaign turns familiar bad habits into moments of absurd humour that hit home. This simple yet powerful idea invites self-reflection among drivers and clearly drives home its message.
Marielle Descalsota
Senior reporter, Campaign Asia-Pacific
Campaign: InkVisible
Brand / Agency: UN Women, BBDO Pakistan
Category: Healthcare
In Pakistan, a third of married women experience domestic violence, often hidden behind the very rituals meant to celebrate them. What seals this campaign as a genuine Spikes contender is its real-world impact: parliamentarians wore henna bruises into National Assembly sessions, helpline calls surged after launch, and henna artists across Pakistan were trained to serve as first responders. Visually arresting and institutionally disruptive, it's anything but lip service.
Campaign: Voice Wanted
Brand / Agency: Korean National Police Agency, Cheil Korea
Category: Outdoor
It takes an innovative approach to public safety campaigns. What makes this different is how it turned the abstract tangible, visual, and audible. A perpetrator's voice was extracted as an actual waveform and rendered into a wanted poster. Real voiceprint data from real scammers was used to build composite portraits, which were distributed across 14,000 physical locations, from ATMs to police stations. The message to those committing crimes cuts through: you're not as invisible as you think.
Nikita Mishra
Editor, Campaign Asia-Pacific
Campaign: Baatan he Baatan mein (Love in a few words)
Brand/Agency: Whatsapp/Fundamental
Category: Film/ Consumer services, B2B
This nine-minute beauty captures a surprising breadth of emotion as the relationship between newlyweds Manoj and Asha slowly unfolds. Married one day and separated the next by Manoj’s quarry job hundreds of miles away in rural India, the two begin their marriage as strangers. They build their connection, awkwardly, hesitantly, through voice notes and video messages sent across odd work schedules and patchy connectivity.
Directed by one of my Bollywood favourite directors, Amit Sharma, a rare filmmaker who is equally comfortable in cinema as well as advertising. Sharma has built a reputation for emotionally intelligent storytelling—work that finds humour and tenderness in ordinary lives. One of the finest examples remains Badhaai Ho, the sleeper Bollywood hit that turned a potentially awkward family premise into something warm, witty and deeply human.
That same sensibility runs through this film. WhatsApp’s Voice and Video Notes are lifelines that allow the distance between the protagonists, message by message, to shrink and a young romance to bloom.
The work is a perfect marriage of craft, cultural insight and product truth, and that for me is profound. For millions of migrant workers across India, digital connections are the lifelines that sustain families and nurture relationships across impossible distances and gruelling work hours. And Sharma captures it with such restraint that the product doesn't pop out as an intrusion; it’s an intricate, organic thread in the narrative tapestry. The film simply observes the moment the connection happens and trusts the audience to feel its weight.
Robert Sawatzky
Editorial Director, Asia at Haymarket Media Group
Campaign: Everything has a point
Brand / Agency: Central the 1 Credit Card, Wolf BKK (Thailand)
Category: Film
A Wolf BKK ad for Central Retail simply cannot be ignored. They’ve laid the groundwork with so many iconic ads like The Air Drummer and Girls in White, that one cannot look away. To be clear, this is not one of those iconic films. This is simpler, more to the point (pardon the pun) with an effective message. But it still grips the viewer immediately with an intangible mix of sharp visuals, deliberate pacing and nonsensical elements to generate maximum curiosity through the film. It follows a shopper home who has purchased a new brand name jacket, bag, glasses and a durian which she is about to cut into with a chainsaw. Why? Because everything has a point, which the film reveals. Unlike some of the other comic Thai films that build towards a punchline but forces a viewer to sit though a lengthy narrative to get there, this film keeps your attention throughout. For this reason it’s both more remarkable and less so as an award entry, but wins over Campaign’s critics.
Campaign: Whiskas LoCATor
Brand / Agency: Whiskas, Ogency (Kazakhstan)
Category: Media
This is simply a great idea on how to use outdoor media for good, provided that the funds are in place to keep an ongoing campaign. It addresses the issue of lost cats in Kazakhstan, where most don’t return home, animal shelters are usually oversubscribed and authorities are entitled to put homeless cats down on the spot. This clever campaign removes the Whiskas cat from the product packaging in its outdoor advertising, opting to replace it with a lost cast in the local area where the outdoor ad appears. In doing so, it turns an advertising network into a cat locator tool. Not so sure about the use of cat food smelling boxes, which could entice more cats to run astray. The concept is brilliant, and claims to have saved 124 cats while generating business and marketing results.
