Contagious Pioneers 2024 /

Eight creative agencies from five continents have earned a place on the 2024 Contagious Pioneers list.

The Contagious Pioneer agencies are those that we believe have set the standard for excellence in commercial creativity over the past year by consistently making the most innovative and potent work on the planet.

The 2024 Contagious Pioneer agencies, listed in alphabetical order, are:

• BETC Paris
• Colenso BBDO, Auckland
• Gut Buenos Aires
• Howatson+Company, Sydney
• Lucky Generals, London
• Ogilvy India, Mumbai
• Rethink, Toronto
• Uncommon Creative Studio, London

We pick our Pioneers by analysing the campaigns featured on our Contagious IQ platform — and nothing else.

Only work that demonstrates the highest levels of creativity and strategic thinking passes our editorial filter to make it onto IQ.

Between January 2023 and March 2024, our editors and analysts reviewed many thousands of campaigns, debated the merits of approximately 1500, but wrote about fewer than 400.

The Pioneers are the agencies that had the most campaigns featured on Contagious IQ in that period, and which also distinguished themselves through other metrics, such as the number of clients represented in their body of work, and whether we made their campaigns ‘Editor’s Picks’ or chose them for in-depth follow-up ‘Insight & Strategy’ interviews.

Contagious’ editor, Chloe Markowicz, said: ‘At Contagious, we only concern ourselves with the very best marketing in the world. So having a single campaign featured on the Contagious IQ platform is already high praise for any agency, but to be ranked a Contagious Pioneer signifies that an agency has consistently achieved excellence.

‘Our 2024 Pioneers agencies have created work that stands out as the most creative, innovative and effective in the industry. They deserve recognition for campaigns that demonstrate breakthrough-thinking and set a new creative standard, exhibiting what future-facing marketing should look like.’

It’s no use buying us lunch or telling us you like our haircuts; the only way to become a Contagious Pioneer agency is by consistently making great work that we feature on Contagious IQ.

We don’t have set criteria for choosing which campaigns we write about, but we do have certain…proclivities. We tend to cover work that we can really get our analytical claws into. This could mean campaigns that pursue a business objective — reducing price sensitivity or creating a new consumption occasion, for example — in an interesting way. Or it could be ads that cleverly utilise new technologies and media, or that harness behavioural biases, or cultural or consumer tends.

Our editors and analysts are constantly searching for examples of commercial creativity that demonstrate these qualities, but you can improve your chances of attracting our attention by sending your work to [email protected] and telling us what makes it innovative and effective. And if you’d like to say something nice about our haircuts while you’re at it, we wouldn’t mind.

Contagious IQ is packed with more than 12,000 case studies analysing the most innovative and effective work around the world.

Filter your searches by categories like product sector, business challenge to find best-in-class campaigns that will inspire you to crack that brief or win that pitch, fast.

Our online intelligence platform also includes in-depth strategy interviews with the teams behind the work, brand case studies, summaries of new research, and much, much more.

Click here, and we’ll show you around.