When Marketing Makes Something Happen.
WHAT A NEW GENERATION OF CASE STUDIES REVEALS ABOUT MARKETING’S CHANGING ROLE.
There is a familiar way of measuring what marketing does.
We measure attention. Awareness. Engagement. Preference. Leads. Sales. Growth.
All matter. But looking across this year’s Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ winners, another question kept surfacing:
What became meaningfully different because marketing got involved?
A missing-child alert appears on the screens of cars already on the road. Twitch streamers become an early-warning network for wildfires. A temporary tattoo helps children understand why sunscreen matters. A gaming challenge helps teenagers recognize that skills they already possess could lead to a career in electrical engineering. A mother’s heartbeat becomes a tool she can actually use to help settle her baby.
These are very different ideas, addressing very different challenges.
But look across them—and across the 2026 winners as a whole—and something interesting begins to emerge.
The most interesting marketing isn’t simply communicating an idea. Increasingly, it is helping make something happen.
It can turn media into infrastructure. Technology into a useful human tool. Participation into action. An existing behavior into a new opportunity. Brand purpose into an operating decision.
None of this diminishes marketing’s responsibility to build brands and businesses. In fact, many of this year’s winners delivered significant commercial results.
What distinguishes them is what happened in addition.
Something meaningful happened because marketing got involved.
That is the idea at the heart of the 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards—and the 17 winning initiatives below show the many forms that difference can take.
READ: HOW MARKETING MAKES A MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCE →
What the 2026 winners reveal about marketing’s changing role.
CLICK ON THE WINNER’S NAME IN ORANGE TO VIEW THE CASE STUDY
GRAND PRIX
Initiative Vermisste Kinder & Free2move — Screen2Save
MEDIAPLUS Germany
More than 500 connected vehicle screens became part of a real-time missing-child alert network, extending geographically as a search expanded. Marketing infrastructure became public-safety infrastructure—and helped create a new way to mobilize people already on the road when every minute matters.
Sanofi — Badge of Honor
Havas Media North America
Living kidney donation leaves a scar. Sanofi transformed that scar into a visible badge of generosity—and a reason for others to consider becoming donors themselves. In a Houston pilot, donor applications rose from one in the previous 12 months to 85 in four months, demonstrating marketing’s ability to move beyond awareness toward consequential action.
Sapeurs-Pompiers de France — FireCatchers
Havas Play France
FireCatchers turned the “Starting Soon” screens of Twitch streamers into virtual wildfire watchtowers. What began with four streamers grew to hundreds more, generating thousands of hours of surveillance and helping detect fires in real time. An existing media behavior became a participatory early-warning network.
PLATINUM
American Express — Unsigned
UM London
American Express turned music sponsorship into something more tangible: support for emerging artists and the grassroots venues on which music culture depends. The initiative created opportunities for unsigned talent while investing in permanent infrastructure for live music.
Cesar (Mars) — Cesar x TripAdvisor: Dog Friendly Travel
EssenceMediacom
Cesar and Tripadvisor addressed a practical problem familiar to millions of pet owners: traveling with a dog can still be surprisingly difficult. By building dog-friendly planning tools, guides, recognition and resources into the travel experience, the partnership made pet-friendly travel easier to discover, plan and enjoy.
DNA Vibe — Ukraine LAMP
Purpose Worldwide
What began as an effort to donate wearable recovery devices to people affected by the war in Ukraine evolved into something more sustainable. DNA Vibe helped create a locally operated model for assembling and distributing recovery technology inside Ukraine—moving from sending help to building lasting local capability.
Huggies — Sound of a Hug
UM Canada
Huggies took something deeply familiar to a baby—the rhythm of a parent’s heartbeat—and transformed it into a personalized sleep experience combining heartbeat rhythm, music, white noise and soundscapes. Rather than simply communicating comfort, the brand created a tool parents could actually use.
Nestlé Infant Nutrition — When Moms Decide, AI Guides
Zenith Taiwan
New mothers rarely make decisions in a neat, linear journey. Nestlé Infant Nutrition used AI to better understand those shifting moments of uncertainty and provide more relevant guidance when mothers needed it—combining technological capability with human insight rather than treating AI as an end in itself.
Vodafone — GO REAL LIFE: Live in the Now Instead of the Net
Weischer.OOH x Carat Germany
For a technology company, encouraging people to spend less time with technology might seem counterintuitive. Vodafone did exactly that, inviting people to put down their devices and reconnect with life beyond the screen—an approach that also strengthened trust, preference and perceptions of the brand’s positive influence.
GOLD
Decathlon Canada — This Black Friday, Instead of Making Deals, We’re Making Time
Cossette Media Canada
Instead of adding another promotion to one of retail’s busiest days, Decathlon encouraged people to reclaim time for sport. The initiative translated the brand’s belief in movement into actual behavior—while also producing strong commercial results.
ISDIN — UV Tattoo to Learn
Havas Play & Arena Media Spain
ISDIN made an invisible health risk visible to children. A UV-reactive temporary tattoo revealed the Big Bad Wolf in sunlight and made him disappear when sunscreen was applied—turning sun protection from an instruction into something children could see, understand and participate in.
Knorr (Unilever) — #UnlockYourGreenFlag
PHD Germany GmbH
Knorr connected cooking with the language and behavior of modern dating, positioning food skills as a “green flag” for Gen Z. Through Tinder and a wider creator ecosystem, the idea turned cooking into a new form of participation and compatibility rather than simply another product message.
Make-A-Wish UK — Overcooked Live
Arena Media UK
With gaming wishes rising sharply, Make-A-Wish UK turned the popular game Overcooked into a live, interactive fundraising experience. Viewers could donate to influence the gameplay itself, making participation part of the mechanism for helping grant children’s wishes.
Nosotras — Me Feat. Me
PHD Chile
Created in collaboration with the trans community, Me Feat. Me used music and technology to enable artist Vitto to perform alongside an earlier version of himself. The result transformed a deeply personal story of identity into a broader cultural conversation shaped with, rather than simply about, the community it represented.
OVE & FEEI & Oesterreichs Energie & Bundesinnung Elektrotechnik & Bundesgremium Einrichtungs- und Elektrofachhandel — JOIN THE FUTURE Redstone Challenge
Mediaplus Austria
Austria needs more young people to consider careers in electrical engineering. Rather than simply telling teenagers about those opportunities, the Redstone Challenge met them inside Minecraft—helping participants recognize that the logic, systems thinking and problem-solving skills they were already using could point toward a real-world future.
Zurich — The Lost Sense Experience
OMD Germany
Zurich made one of life’s less visible losses tangible through an immersive experience exploring the relationship between scent, memory and emotion. By helping people experience what the loss of smell can mean, the work gave new dimension to the idea of protecting what matters.
A Broader View of Marketing’s Role
Taken together, these winners also reveal larger shifts in marketing’s role—from communication to utility, from attention to action, and from brand purpose to consequential decisions.
The Internationalist explores those emerging patterns—and what they may signal about where marketing is heading—in a new Trends & Insights analysis.
