BBDO Named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies List for 2026

​BBDO has been recognised on Fast Company's 2026 Most Innovative Companies list, a prestigious annual recognition that honours businesses demonstrating impact and commitment to embracing and fuelling innovation.

"Making this list is a nice moment for us – not because it celebrates advertising, but because it validates a shift we've been working hard to make," said Chris Beresford-Hill, global chief creative officer at BBDO. "We believe the real innovation in creativity happens upstream, when you're helping solve the business problem itself, not just dressing up the answer later. When creativity starts influencing supply chains, product decisions, or cultural behaviour – that's when it stops being communication and starts being impact."

BBDO's nomination reflects a strategic shift in how the agency approaches innovation. Rather than making claims about what BBDO is not, the agency has focused on what it does best: solving business problems through creativity. The submission highlighted measurable business impact including selling millions more Pepsi cans, reversing Neutrogena's two-year sales decline, and generating tens of thousands of Volkswagen orders in less than an hour.

Beyond commercial impact, BBDO's submission also featured work that prevented violence, changed laws, and rewrote stigmas. Sandy Hook Promise's ‘Know The Signs’ campaign has directly prevented 18 school shootings. Libresse's ‘Never Just a Period’ contributed to four national legal reforms including menstrual leave policies and tax exemptions. And ‘The Final Exam’ by Change the Ref helped spark the introduction of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention Act.

BBDO says this recognition validates what it means by ‘Do Big Things’, a global positioning that Little Black Book broke last year, which is focused on being an upstream business partner that solves real problems and delivers measurable impact, whether moving markets, shifting laws, or saving lives.