B2B Marketing Awards 2025 entries reveal a sharp rise in brand-led, high-impact creative work.
Entries to the ‘Best use of creative’ category show the biggest year-on-year jump, with budget allocation data showing a reallocation from media to creative/production.
Creative is the big winner from the B2B Marketing Awards 2025, with the number of entries into the ‘Best use of creative’ category increasing by almost 25% year-on-year, and from the starting point of already being a popular category.
This perhaps surprising figure comes at a time when B2B creative is going through a period of AI-driven transformation, with gen AI platforms impacting positively and negatively on all forms of B2B creative, and the individuals responsible for them.
You might be forgiven for expecting commoditisation of creative, rather than its elevation, but this does not seem to have been the case.
Another category that faired (perhaps surprisingly) well in the entries this year was ‘Best product or service launch’, which saw 100% increase in entries from 2024.
It is possible that this category was artificially deflated last year, when it showed a decline, but it’s also possible that companies are recognising challenging economic times to launch disruptive new offerings to shake up markets and categories.
Best use of customer insight, Best use of thought leadership, best limited budget campaign and Best use of ABM also saw modest increases in entries.
Brand versus demand?
Two categories that have been the subject of much discussion in B2B circles in recent years, but remained flat in terms of entry numbers this year, were ‘Best brand initiative’ and ‘Best use of demand generation’.
Entries focused on brand declined by a single submission year on year, despite the fact that we split this category into two (small and large budget campaigns).
Meanwhile, best use of demand generation was flat year on year. Arguably the hype and arguments around whether B2B marketers should be maintaining investment demand generation or putting all their eggs into the brand basket have counted for very little in reality.
Elsewhere, the biggest single decline in entries was in the ‘Best use of media’ category, but there was also a decline in entries to the ‘Best omnichannel campaign’ category.
It might be reasonable to assume that what’s behind both these trends is campaign spending being reigned in due to constraints being applied to budget due a reduction in confidence.
That might explain a reduction in the number of channels being used and a consequent reduction in omnichannel entries. However, perplexingly both average campaign budgets and average channels used showed a year-on-year increase – the former by a frankly astonishing one third, and the latter by 10%.
When combined with a small overall reduction in entries, this suggests that brands may be investing more in fewer campaigns (perhaps driven in part by inflation eating into flat marketing budgets), with a recognition of higher stakes for success, aligned with greater professionalism of marketers within both client and agency teams.
Complexity around channel and platform integration and rising expectations for seamless CX may also be eating into costs. A few other interesting facts relating to budgets:
- Budgets for middle-tier campaigns have risen most significantly
- The average campaign budget in 2025 was £164k versus £100k in 2024
- The proportion of budget allocated to media has declined, whereas the allocation to creative and production has increased.
- £100k appears to have become the new default baseline for campaign investment, with a large number of entries hovering just above this level.
This is the first in a series of articles that I’ll be doing on trends we can see from entries into the B2B Marketing Awards, and the Elevation Awards, which is B2B Marketing’s US-centric awards programme.
