If It Can Be Missed, Is It Really Immortal?

We’ve never been better equipped to make things. And we can do so in a manner that’s speedier, more plentiful, adaptable and translatable. But whether any of it will still matter years from now is a different question altogether.

It’s a question many of us are considering during the submission period for this year’s Immortal Awards, LBB’s annual competition created to identify creative work that’s capable of long outliving the moment it was made.

For Andrés Ordóñez, global chief creative officer at McCann and a juror for this year’s awards, the answer to whether immortal creativity can still exist in 2026, goes beyond a simple ‘yes’. He believes brands need it more than ever before.

“Immortal work is the work that gets attached to you,” he says. “You carry it with you, you share it with your friends, you download it, and you use it in meetings. It helps you set the bar. It makes you jealous in a beautiful way."

He argues the difficulty now is finding it among everything else. He views much of today’s output as meaningless because it has “no logic behind it, there is no true insight”. It is only when both are present that immortal work is capable of being born.

And he’s long thought about creativity through the meeting of ‘magic and logic’. Magic provides the feeling, the surprise, and the instinctive response. While logic gives that feeling a reason and right to exist. Without both, the execution alone isn’t likely to endure.

Andrés admits he doesn’t know how much immortal work is out there right now. “But when there is, it shines against the rest and needs to be celebrated.” He believes doing so is the duty of the industry “because that’s how brands grow. That’s why we do what we do. That’s what pushes us to be better creatives.”

He adds, “Because if not, then we’re just machines, and I don’t think that’s what we want to be.” Of course, the machines are getting quicker. And some might think the pure volume of output could make it easier to miss immortal work. Andrés is not one of these people.

“I don’t think immortal work can be missed… It could, but the question is, if it’s been missed, is it immortal?”

For him, the more interesting question is around whether the industry is using its new powers of speed in the right places. Rather than allowing tech to compress the time spent thinking, he wonders if it could protect it.

Nor does Andrés think there is only one kind of immortality. “There is every kind of immortal,” he says. "So sometimes it is just a beautiful moment. And it just hits you the right way, and you will never forget. And there are others that can keep building over time.”

He compares it to memory itself. “There are moments in life that could be just a second that you carry with you for the rest of your life. And there are moments that will be a month or year, and you’ll carry those,” he says. “Immortal doesn’t have a time or a format. It is based more on the impact on us. [Whether] we will carry that idea forever. That’s what makes it immortal.”

He even believes that, sometimes, you’ll know before the work even exists. “You feel it,” he says, recalling moments when someone will come with an idea waiting to be born.

As for whether or not speed and tech have anything to do with immortality, Andrés is unconvinced. “We used to tell stories on rocks, and now we tell [them] in five seconds," he says. “But at the end of the day, that story is the one that connects with you, [and makes you] keep talking about it.

“There's a heart, and there is a mind that connects with things. The surprise and delight of a great piece of creativity will always be there.” Formats will evolve, tools will change, attention spans and the places advertising appears will continue to shift, but storytelling and the human beings receiving the stories are much the same.

And at a time when we can make almost anything, immortal work is the stuff worth carrying with us.