These are the marketing awards you don’t enter, but could get one anyway whether you like it or not. It’s where I cast my mind back to the marketing moments over the past year that inspired me, riled me or frankly left me bamboozled. And dish out the gongs accordingly.

Judging panel, shortlist compiler, final arbiter – that’ll be me. So, if there is something you’re not happy with below, you know at whom to toss the innards of your festive cracker.

The Small Step Award for sustainability: Ikea

Ikea opened its Oxford Street London store in May and, while the impression is that the furniture and home bits-and-bobs footprint is tight, the café area is massive. And packed. The brand is taking a step closer to its sustainability goal of eliminating non-recyclable plastics by serving all the food sold here in 100% biodegradable seaweed packaging, made by Earthshot prize-winner Notpla. The meals and snacks disappear inside the customers and the packaging just… disappears.

It’s a start. Ikea sells over 100 million hotdogs and 1 billion meatballs globally every year, so you have to hope that what happens in London doesn’t stay in London.

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The Stop Digging Award for broken trust: BBC

It is always a dodgy sign when the leadership of an organisation under siege declares it is one of our most trusted brands. The tactic was tried repeatedly by the management of the Post Office, and look what happened there.

This year it was the turn of the BBC, after it was caught accidently reassembling a series of newsclips in such a way that it just happened to emphasise a view it held about Donald Trump. A straight mea culpa was what was then required. Instead, from the departing director general Tim Davie, we got the retort that the BBC was the “most trusted news brand globally”. Davie later added that the organisation represented “the very best of what we should be as a society”. That would be a smugly contentious remark at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

The Break-The-Internet Award for brand engagement: Spotify

On 3 December, Spotify’s ‘Wrapped’ initiative dropped, and within hours everyone was communicating about their ‘listening age’. For days, journalists, commentators and celebs jumped on the new feature, boasting about or lamenting the personal verdict that had emerged from the brand’s AI smarts. It was the runaway tactical thrust of the year, and bang-on Spotify brand values.

OK, and here’s an insight into how arbitrary awards judging can be – especially when the panel consists of just one, self-confessedly, biased individual. How could I not give Spotify an Elfmas when it not only opined that my musical taste was ‘uncategorisable’, for being so ‘eclectic’, but gave me a listening age of 23?!

The Gerald Ratner Award for injudicious candour: Fernando Fernandez

This was one of those ‘did he really say that?’ moments. Unilever’s newly appointed CEO didn’t merely say it, but doubled down on it straight after. “Brands,” he explained to an investor audience, “are by default suspicious” – before going on to add that “messages from brands coming from corporations are suspicious messages”.

But, but, but… this is Unilever we’re talking about here. Owner of over 400 brands worldwide, with a total brand valuation, according to the experts Brand Finance, of a cool $35bn (£26bn). Later in the year Fernandez announced the business would divest itself of some of these troublesome assets – the smaller ones Unilever used to call ‘local jewels’. But how does the pitch work for that? ‘Who will bid me £100m for this somewhat suspicious entity known as Marmite?’

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The Fourth-Lever Award for price innovation: Wizz Air

Of marketing’s classic four levers – the ones that all start with P – the lever marked ‘price’ is the one least pulled. The levers of ‘product’ and ‘place’ show some faint signs of use, while the one marked ‘promotion’ is worn down and smoothed from constant manipulation. Price, it seems, is something marketers assume emerges from elsewhere in the organisation, spirited up by some amalgam of finance, ops and sales.

So, it was good to see Wizz Air giving the pricing lever a firm and measured tug in October, with the third iteration of its ‘All you can fly’ initiative. For a €499 annual subscription, customers can fly unlimited as long as they book within three days of take-off. I like the way the brand frames the offer not solely as a way to save, but as an appeal to self-identity, with the recognition that this is for the ‘spontaneous traveller’. Ah, the blissful power of two levers working in tandem, like the two engines on one of Wizz Air’s jets.

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The Rookie Error Award for renaming: Accenture

In November, the consulting firm announced its 800,000 employees would henceforth be known as ‘reinventors’. Why? Doesn’t it merely channel the tired consulting trope for adding the prefix ‘re’ to verbs that are already stronger without it, like ‘imagine’, ‘engineer’, ‘interpret’ – or, for that matter, ‘invent’?

The Does-My-Brain-In Award for complexity: brand models

Not all of them. You do need something to hold the brand together for communications and innovation. You just don’t need upwards of a dozen boxes to crystallise it. Because what happens then is that teams spend days trying to fill them in without either repetition or contradiction, and the exercise becomes like doing a cryptic crossword where, at the end, we say ‘Yes! We’ve done it!’, and then realise, the next time we can bear to look at the thing and carefully read it through, that nobody else ever will.

If your brand model contains more than six boxes you could spend the first part of the workshop deciding which ones to jettison. It shouldn’t take long.

The Makes-Me-Feel-Optimistic Award: ChatGPT ‘pullup’ spot

I don’t know why it does, but it does. The Simple Minds track helps, the guy achieving his elusive fitness goal is great, and the product is right there – the supportive advice of a million merged experiences scrolling up like a positive, one-to-one coach.

But it’s also the context. AI is something that keeps us on edge, worrying if it will go rogue, dividing us between those who think it will change things immeasurably for the better and those who don’t. This is the way great tech ads work – disarming with a fusion of familiarity and humanity, then revealing a chink of excitement about future potential. It’s just an ad, but it makes you want in.

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The Posthumous Award for influence: Robert Monks

The US activist shareholder, who died in April at the age of 91, was the pioneer of what we now call ESG – environmental, social, governance. You can always tell a person has had a towering influence when the verdicts filter in that their interventionist process is now ‘overdone’. Which is where much of the recent debate on ESG has been heading.

It isn’t overdone, but it could do with new energy and focus. And marketers, with their nuanced understanding of what people will and will not sacrifice in the name of conscious consumption, are well placed to imagine better ways to achieve that.

So, it’s RIP Robert Monks, after a long and well-lived life. But it’s not RIP ESG. Not yet. And that is as good a note as any on which to sign off as we head into the challenges and opportunities of 2026.