We analysed hundreds of the year’s most talked-about campaigns to uncover the creative moves behind them, reveal the approaches advertising keeps returning to and identify the opportunities hiding in the gaps.

See where the industry’s ideas are coming from. Then find somewhere new to take yours.

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The Ad Industry has plenty of inspiration.

It just doesn’t always know what to do with it.

Most advertising databases organise campaigns by brand, sector, agency or award.

Useful when you want to find another car campaign. Less useful when you need to find a new way into your brief.

The Source of the Idea Report looks beneath the finished execution to identify the creative moves that made the work possible.

Because great advertising isn’t just inspiring. It is instructive.

What the year's advertising tells us about where ideas come from.

The industry has favourite ways of thinking

A relatively small group of creative approaches appears repeatedly across the campaigns selected by leading advertising publishers.

The report reveals which approaches dominate, how different sectors use them and where familiarity may be turning into creative convention.

The richest ideas rarely rely on one move

Many of the year’s strongest campaigns combine a clear leading idea with supporting creative moves that make it more distinctive, entertaining or persuasive.

The opportunity is not to pile several ideas together. It is to find one strong way into the problem and know what else could make it work harder.

Popular doesn’t always mean promising

The most frequently used approaches are not necessarily where the greatest creative opportunities lie. By mapping both heavily used and overlooked areas, the report helps reveal where brands are competing for the same territory and where there may still be room to do something unexpected.

Award-winning work gives us another benchmark

The report compares the wider published campaign sample with the WARC Creative 100. This helps distinguish approaches that are simply prevalent across the industry from those that appear more prominently in internationally celebrated creative work.

Distinctiveness is often built into the idea

The most effective use of a brand asset goes beyond adding a logo, colour or character to an execution.

The report examines how campaigns turn recognisable brand properties into the organising idea itself, making the work easier to identify and harder for a competitor to imitate.

The gaps may be more useful than the rankings

Knowing which creative approaches are most popular is interesting.

Knowing what the industry is barely trying may be more useful.

The report identifies less crowded ways of thinking that could offer new routes into familiar campaign problems.

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The full Source of the Idea Report includes:

• Analysis of over 600 campaigns published during Jan-Aug 2026
• The creative approaches appearing most frequently
• Underused approaches with room for greater exploration
• Comparisons with the WARC Creative 100
• Patterns across different sectors
• The ways leading agencies combine creative approaches
• A deeper examination of parody, metaphor, reframing, wordplay and other major creative territories
• Practical implications for strategists and creatives

Join Big Ideas That Work for free and get immediate access to the complete report.

You’ll also get regular updates on new tools and tactics and practical lessons from the work shaping advertising now.

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See the work. Understand the move. Find your own way forward.

Big Ideas That Work is building a practical map of how advertising ideas work.

The aim is not to give you more campaigns to save.

It is to help you recognise useful ways of thinking, retrieve them when a relevant problem appears and apply them to your own brief.

What does your next campaign need to do?

Shift how people see something

Sometimes the problem isn’t the product. It is the frame people use to judge it.

Look for ways to change the comparison, challenge an assumption, expose a hidden truth or make something familiar look completely different.

Questions to start with:

• What is everyone assuming that might be wrong?
• What changes if we change the comparison?
• How could we make the familiar feel unfamiliar again?

Make a product benefit impossible to ignore

A product truth can be important without being interesting.

Look for ways to make an invisible advantage visible, exaggerate the effect, let the product prove itself or build the benefit into the advertising.

Questions to start with:

• What would this benefit look like if we could see it?
• How could the product demonstrate the claim?
• What becomes possible because this product exists?

Change a behaviour

Telling people what they should do rarely gives them a reason to do it.

Look for ways to confront the consequence, remove an excuse, make the desired action easier or turn an ignored behaviour into something people can no longer overlook.

Questions to start with:

• What consequence are people successfully ignoring?
• What excuse is protecting the current behaviour?
• How could the right choice become the easier choice?

Make the brand harder to ignore

Standing out is not simply a matter of looking different.

Look for ways to turn a recognisable brand asset into the idea, exaggerate a distinctive characteristic, break a category convention or behave in a way only your brand could credibly own.

Questions to start with:

• What could this brand do that a competitor couldn’t?
• Which familiar brand asset could carry the whole idea?
• What does the category always do that we could refuse to do?

Turn a weakness into an advantage

Some of the most interesting ideas start with what the category would rather hide.

Look for ways to reframe a limitation, challenge the expectation that makes it look weak or reveal why the apparent disadvantage is exactly what makes the product valuable.

Questions to start with:

• What if the weakness is only weak because of the comparison?
• Who might actively prefer the thing we are apologising for?
• What does this limitation allow us to do better?

Find a less obvious way into the brief

The first sensible answer is often the same answer everyone else found.

Look for ways to change the point of view, introduce an unlikely messenger, make an enemy of the problem, borrow an unexpected format or take the premise somewhere gloriously unreasonable.

Questions to start with:

• Who is the least likely person to make our case?
• What would happen if we took the problem absurdly seriously?
• Where else does this same tension exist?

Want more ways into every brief?

Free membership gives you the report and a regular stream of useful thinking.

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The Big Ideas That Work Starter Pack

A practical way to interrogate a problem, challenge the obvious frame and open up more interesting strategic and creative territories before generating answers.

Full access to the growing ad tactics database

Explore current advertising by the thinking behind it, not only by brand, agency or sector. Find campaigns that solved a similar kind of problem or approached a familiar challenge from an unexpected direction.

Monthly campaign source files

Download a campaign tracker of the best campaigns of each month that are classified not just by agency and brand but by the tactical moves behind them.

Member pricing on the complete collection of practical guides

When you want to go deeper into a particular creative approach, paid members receive 50% off the full collection of specialist tactical engines that you can upload directly to your AI and start using them on your own briefs.