The Smarties South Africa 2026 Winners

Swipe to scroll through the gallery

South Africa – Brand Purpose / Activism

The Brand Purpose/Activism category recognises campaigns that harness the power of brand platforms to champion social causes or address significant societal issues. Entries are evaluated on the credibility of the brand’s commitment, the clarity and courage of its point of view, and how purpose is embedded into the brand’s narrative, actions, and behavior. It underscores the importance of leveraging brand influence and reach, to make a meaningful impact on society. This category emphasizes the role of brands in contributing to the greater good, covering a wide range of initiatives from environmental sustainability to social, political, and economic activism.

South Africa – Social Impact Marketing

The Social Impact Marketing category honors campaigns that leverage marketing to drive significant social change, focusing on initiatives that contribute to public service, social responsibility, and positive shifts in societal attitudes or behaviours. It recognizes efforts that go beyond conventional marketing to make a meaningful difference in the world. Successful entries clearly demonstrate how marketing activity directly contributed to positive change, whether through awareness, participation, behavior change, or real-world impact.

South Africa – Diversity  &  Inclusion

The Diversity & Inclusion category recognizes campaigns focused on promoting understanding, reducing inequalities, and elevating underrepresented voices, showcasing the power of marketing in fostering a more inclusive society.

South Africa – Brand Experience

The Brand Experience category honors campaigns that create immersive, memorable brand interactions, leveraging innovative strategies and technologies to foster deep consumer connections, human centric design and brand loyalty. Campaigns that redefine the interaction between brands and consumers, setting new standards for how brands engage, inspire and connect with their audiences creating a 360-customer experience.

South Africa – Instant Impact / Promotion

The Instant Impact/Promotion category aims to recognize campaigns that not only creatively engage consumers but also drive immediate promotion driven business results, showcasing the power of promotions in today’s competitive market. Campaigns that deliver business impact/results through creative and effective promotional tactics, driving consumer engagement and sales.

South Africa – Customer Growth & Conversion Strategy

The category recognizes campaigns designed to acquire, nurture, and convert customers through data-driven and automation, strategies and marketing technology and honors initiatives that elevate business performance by using CRM, automation, AI, segmentation, and predictive modelling to generate qualified leads, optimize the customer journey, and drive measurable sales and retention outcomes. Winning campaigns demonstrate a clear focus on acquisition efficiency, conversion impact, and long-term customer value.

South Africa – New Product and / or Service Launch / Re-launch

The Product and/or Service Launch category celebrates marketing campaigns that have successfully introduced or reintroduced products or services to the market. This category recognizes the crucial role of strategic marketing in making a launch effective, highlights campaigns that have managed to capture consumer interest, generate buzz, and ultimately drive sales and market share growth from the outset.

South Africa – Real Time Marketing

The Real Time Marketing category celebrates campaigns (campaign activation and /or targeting) that excel in leveraging current data and trends demonstrating agility and strategic innovation. It recognizes the agility and creativity of brands in using real-time information to craft marketing messages that are highly relevant, engaging, and effective in achieving business objectives.

South Africa – Small Budget, Big Impact

The Small Budget, Big Impact category recognizes campaigns that achieve significant marketing success with limited financial resources, with a budget from $5k to $25k, highlighting the power of creativity and strategic efficiency. This total budget must include all campaign-related costs, including but not limited to production, media spend, talent, technology, partnerships, and any other executional expenses. It is mandatory to include the budget converted to USD dollars.

South Africa – Creator / Influencer / Celebrity Marketing

The Creator/Influencer/Celebrity Marketing category celebrates campaigns that effectively leverage personalities to enhance brand engagement and achieve marketing objectives through authentic and persuasive collaborations. brands that use creators, influencers, or celebrities as part of their campaign in a strategic manner to reach and engage target audiences. Showcase the brand narrative, resulting in enhanced consumer interaction and engagement driven by the campaign highlighting the said segments.

South Africa – Partnership, PR & Branded Content Excellence

This category recognizes campaigns that combine PR strategies to generate earned media, expand organic reach, strengthen brand reputation and create impact. It celebrates projects that leverage contemporary communications practices, original content, partnerships, powerful narratives, and innovative formats to engage audiences, shape perceptions, and drive meaningful business outcomes. Eligible entries include initiatives executed at festivals, sporting events, concerts, exhibitions, large public gatherings, proprietary brand events, and any high-visibility occasion capable of driving immersive experiences, multichannel activations, or live/digital integration.

South Africa – Omnichannel Marketing

The Omnichannel Marketing category honors campaigns that achieve a seamless customer experience across multiple channels, showcasing strategic coherence and integration. It celebrates the strategic and tactical prowess of using various media touchpoints including TV, print, radio, outdoor, PR, direct marketing, and digital platforms to craft a coherent brand story that engages consumers at multiple levels of their journey.

South Africa – Cross Digital Media Marketing

This category celebrates digital campaigns that integrates the diversity of various digital platforms to create an engaging, and impactful brand experience, showcasing the power of a comprehensive digital only strategy. Importance of a unified digital strategy that spans various applications and devices (minimum of 3), including desktop, mobile, wearables, digital installations etc. Campaigns should emphasize the ability of brands to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape to develop meaningful consumer engagements that drive business impact.

South Africa – Social Media Marketing

The Social Media Marketing category is dedicated to recognizing outstanding campaigns that utilize social media platforms to achieve marketing objectives, where social platforms themselves are the primary / major channel and strategic driver of the campaign. This category celebrates the strategic use of social networks, messaging apps, and text messaging services to engage audiences, drive sales, enhance brand visibility, and foster meaningful connections with communities or consumers emphasizing strategic engagement and innovative content to drive business results.

South Africa – AI Powered Data Insights / Contextual Marketing

This category celebrates campaigns that effectively utilize AI driven data analytics clearly articulated insight uncovered through research, data analysis or a deep understanding of consumer, cultural or business pain points, A contextual information and technology to deliver personalized marketing experiences to tailor marketing messages of the target audience. Importance of data-driven decision-making in crafting marketing strategies are paramount to the success of a highly engaging and effective campaign meeting business objectives.

South Africa – Advanced Technologies Marketing

The Advanced Technologies Marketing category recognizes campaigns that creatively apply emerging or advanced technologies to transform consumer engagement, elevate brand interaction, and pioneer new forms of marketing innovation. This category includes initiatives leveraging AR/VR, spatial computing, audio/voice/sonic experiences, NFTs and Web3, as well as location intelligence, Bluetooth, sensors, IoT, automation, and other breakthrough digital capabilities. Campaigns in this category push the boundaries of what technology can unlock for brands and consumers, delivering interactive, intelligent, and future-ready experiences that redefine how audiences connect with brands.

South Africa – Retail Media / O2O Excellence

Honours campaigns or initiatives that leverage retail-media channels (online or in-store) to deliver meaningful business impact. This could include sponsored product placements, in-retail digital media, branded content within retailer ecosystems, retail display & media, online retail-platform advertising, “shop-the-ad” activations, or integrated omnichannel retail-media strategies.

South Africa – Audience Engagement Excellence Using AI

The Audience Engagement Excellence Using AI category celebrates marketing campaigns that utilize artificial intelligence to significantly enhance audience engagement. This award recognizes efforts that employ AI technologies to analyze behaviors, predict preferences, automate interactions, and personalize communications at scale. It showcases how AI can be a critical tool in understanding and connecting with audiences more deeply and effectively, leading to increased engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

South Africa – Design / Customer / User Experience

This category celebrates campaigns that excel in creating online and offline superior customer and user experiences, through innovative and thoughtful design, significantly enhancing user satisfaction and engagement.

South Africa – Personalization

The Personalization category recognizes campaigns that achieve excellence in delivering highly customized content to consumers, leveraging data and technology to enhance engagement and drive business results.

South Africa – Short or Long Form Video

The Short or Long Form Video category acknowledges campaigns and content that leverage video content (not necessarily high production quality) including micro-dramas to captivate audiences, utilizing creative storytelling and high production quality to achieve significant engagement and business outcomes. Highlight campaigns that leverage the power of video to convey compelling messages, drive consumer engagement, and enhance brand identity across digital and traditional platforms, including micro-dramas.

South Africa – Innovative Use of AI in Advertising

The category, Innovative Use of AI in Advertising, recognizes campaigns that innovatively integrate artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize advertising strategies, enhancing personalization, and overall campaign engagement using Generative / Predictive AI. The campaigns showcasing how AI has been used to transform traditional creative practices. like new product or Customer offering development like customer services to enhance customer engagement and personalize experiences in creative ways integrating advertising content and strategies, enhancing the overall consumer experience.

South Africa – AI-Driven Creative Excellence

The AI-Driven Creative Excellence category recognizes campaigns that outstandingly integrate artificial intelligence with creative strategies, enhancing advertising effectiveness and delivering innovative marketing solutions. This category celebrates outstanding achievements in the creative use of AI tools—including image and video generation, voice synthesis, multilingual translation, and real-time streaming—to enhance the adaptability and impact of marketing campaigns. Recognizing entries that not only optimize costs but also tailor content dynamically for diverse audiences, this award spotlights pioneers who seamlessly integrate AI to drive engagement and deliver measurable business outcomes.

South Africa – D2C / E-commerce Marketing Excellence

This category aims to meet the rapidly growing needs of local regional D2C brands, e-commerce companies, and game enterprises expanding into overseas markets, this category recognizes outstanding digital marketing campaigns in global market promotion practices. It aims to establish benchmarks for international marketing and provide valuable references for industry practitioners. This category applies to digital marketing case studies conducted in regional and overseas markets for D2C brands, e-commerce, or gaming companies, helping clients reach overseas users and ultimately achieve increased brand awareness and influence, or efficient conversion outcomes.

2026 South Africa Industry Award Winners