Judging The Drum’s B2B Creative Aces, here are my takeaways.

I've been judging the #CreativeAces since 2016, and every year I walk away having learned something. A thank you to Cathy Smith and Tom Stein for the endorsement that first got me in the room.

Under The Drum, this category keeps getting bigger — and better. This year we got into everything from AI and creativity to the real societal role of B2B. My work takes me all over, but I always come back to B2B, because it tends to be the earliest signal of the bigger shifts coming for the whole industry.

A few things I'm still thinking about:

🤝 Human to human. The wall between B2B and B2C has basically come down, and the work is stronger for it. The pieces I loved most didn't read as "business" work at all — they were emotionally led and culturally tuned in. The real lesson isn't "make B2B feel like B2C." It's that audiences never sorted themselves into those buckets in the first place.

🤖 AI is still wide open. Most work used AI as a garnish — a production shortcut, a polish. The opportunity? Treat AI it as the starting point of the idea itself.

🎁 The product is becoming the idea. When the thing you make is genuinely new, the story tells itself. I'm noticing how often the most awarded work now is a product, not an ad about one.

🌍 Global and hyper-local at once. The best work scaled a universal idea while feeling like it was made by someone who actually lives in the market. Not translated — rooted. That's the bar I hold us to across LATAM and EMEA: one idea, many authentic accents.

Grateful to The Drum and my fellow jurors for the conversations. These weeks always sharpen how I think about the year ahead.

And while we're on the subject of what only people bring to creativity — Episode 3 of Adobe x The Drum: TheCreativeMachine is now live. Our very own Simon Morris and Rachel Thornton join Reuben Webb and other pioneering marketers and creatives to explore the value only humans bring to the creative process — where speed, personalisation and craft coexist, and AI unlocks time and headspace for the strategy and the idea. Worth a watch on The Drum TV (link in comments)