The Great ACE Race 2025
Last Saturday night was the annual Advertising Club of Edmonton (ACE) Awards, our favourite event of the year. Berlin has entered work into this show and attended the celebration every year since we started in 2012. This year we won 18 awards, including 4 ACE Awards and 14 Awards of Distinction.
There was a lot of great work from across the Edmonton creative industry, and our frenemies at TBWA, ZGM and FKA all had some fantastic stuff that got awarded as well. Check out all the winning work here.
For those not familiar with the behind-the-curtain machinations of the advertising industry, we are extremely awards-driven. It’s a sickness. There are global shows, national shows and local shows, altogether too many to count. In Canada there is an annual list called the Creative Report Card that Strategy Magazine puts out and no one outside the industry reads. It ranks creative agencies across the country based on how many awards won, and what shows they were won in, in the previous year. It is really hard to get high on the national list as an indie agency in Edmonton, but we always try to and there are a handful of other local agencies who do as well. We are ranked 50th in Canada on the 2025 list which doesn’t sound that great but actually makes us one of the top independent agencies in the country west of Toronto, believe it or not.
But all of that is secondary to what the ACE Awards is. For the Edmonton creative community, the ACE Awards is the one night each year we all get together to celebrate the work and celebrate each other, and this wonderful business. It’s prom, it’s the Oscars, it’s Vegas, it’s a high school dance in a gymnasium, it’s another average meal in a really big room, and it’s our community coming together to say “yes, we are here, and we are doing this. Our work matters and we love to do it.”
Berlin has at various times won and lost the ACE Awards. We have had years when we left, sad and tipsy, without a single trophy. And others when we’ve won the Best in Show award along with so many other ones we needed to find a box to carry them. But whoever ends up on the stage, each year it is the best night of the year because it reminds us of how lucky we are to be in this weird and wonderful job where you get to be creative for a living.
And that’s just ACEs by us.
