Gold-Winning States + ‘Beary’ Adorable: Advertising 2022 Winners & Advertising 2023 Entries

With our Advertising 2023 slowly but surely receiving entries, we thought we’d feature one alongside a winner from last year’s competition.

A Gold Award-winning promotional poster series for the ABC hit show “Stateless” (above) was created by the studio’s in-house creative agency ABC Made. Inspired by a true story, the Australian drama series focuses on four strangers in an immigration detention center in the middle of the Australian desert: “an airline hostess escaping a suburban cult, an Afghan refugee fleeing persecution, a young Australian father escaping a dead-end job, and a bureaucrat caught up in a national scandal. When their lives intersect they are pushed to the brink of sanity, yet profound emotional connections are made amongst the group.”

When devising their strategy for the national poster campaign, the agency’s creative team sought to create a series of posters that would engage Australian audiences by emulating the powerful and psychologically charged atmosphere in the show while weaving in the stories of several characters across continents. They also wanted to tackle the complex and challenging issues of detention centers and mental illness. As a result, each poster gives viewers a glimpse into the individual psyches and backgrounds of the four leads while showcasing the talented ensemble cast through dramatic fractal photography. After the campaign’s launch, Stateless was quickly embraced by Australian audiences and was soon met with critical success at the AACTA awards.

Next up is an entry from our current 2023 Advertising competition. Animation studio Animaccord and Russian Mobile network provider MTS teamed up to create the commercial “Masha and the Bear” (above), which employs the popular Russian animated series of the same name to promote the network provider’s newest subscription plan for kids called NETARIF Junior. In the special animated video, the beloved bear and child duo demonstrate the benefits of a new MTS subscription plan and its services using funny real-life situations. In order for the video to be natively associated with the cartoon and reach its target audience, Animaccord enlisted the help of the show’s director, Natalia Malinga, who established the commercial’s aim of showing how parents and guardians can rely on NETARIF Junior to keep their young children entertained and prevent mayhem. In December of 2021, the video was released to an audience of over 36 million through Masha and the Bear‘s official Youtube channel and garnered over 5.3 million views on the platform.

There is still time to submit to our Advertising Annual 2023 competition! Click here to learn more. To see more winners from our 2022 Graphis Advertising Annual, click here.