BLKJ Havas dominates Effie Singapore Awards 2026 with Grand Prix and five Gold: BBH, TBWA and Grab Creative Studio also perform strongly

BLKJ Havas Singapore has been awarded the inaugural Effie Singapore Grand Prix for ‘Brewlander AI Irresponsibly’, and also took home 5 Gold, 6 Silver and 4 Bronze awards, at the Effie Singapore Awards 2026. Other strong performances were Grab Creative Studio with 2 Gold, 3 Silver + Bronze; BBH Singapore who won 2 Gold, Silver + 2 Bronze and TBWA\Singapore with Gold, 2 Silver and 3 Bronze.

The Association of Advertising and Marketing Singapore (AAMS) today celebrated marketing effectiveness across Singapore’s advertising and marketing industry, bringing the Effie Singapore Awards 2026 and Effie Singapore Learning Festival together for a full day of learning, recognition and exchange on 10 September. The day culminated in the Effie Singapore Awards 2026 gala, where 50 trophies were presented across 27 categories, recognising work that delivered real, measurable impact.

See the Gold winners below:
BBH Singapore’s ‘Child Secure Project’ for Income Insurance
BBH Singapore’s ‘Max The Stress Ball’ for Income Insurance
BLKJ Havas Singapore’s ‘Brewlander AI Irresponsibly’ for Brewlander
BLKJ Havas Singapore’s ‘Brewlander AI Irresponsibly’ for Brewlander
BLKJ Havas Singapore’s ‘Brewlander AI Irresponsibly’ for Brewlander
BLKJ Havas Singapore’s ‘ECDA Be The 1% Shaping Tomorrow’ for Early Childhood Development Agency
BLKJ Havas Singapore’s ‘Great Eastern Reach For Great’ for Great Eastern
Grab Creative Studio’s ‘Awwbandon Cart’ for Grab
Grab Creative Studio’s ‘Awwbandon Cart’ for Grab
TBWA\Singapore’s ‘Salt Buries True Flavours: Replacing the Voice of Authority with Ancestry’ for Health Promotion Board

“Singapore’s marketing community has raised its standards year on year, and 2026’s award entries were the strongest reflection of that yet. From the campaigns that changed audience behaviours to work that redefined what a small budget can achieve, The range we saw across brands, agencies and categories speaks to an industry that has made effectiveness a cornerstone of how it operates. ” said Rowena Bhagchandani, Co-Chair, Effie Singapore Awards 2026, and Chief Executive Officer, BLKJ Havas.

Effie Singapore Awards 2026
A total of 50 trophies were presented during the awards night, including the Grand Prix, 10 Gold, 22 Silver and 17 Bronze trophies, reflecting the creative ambition and commercial rigour of Singapore’s marketing and advertising industry. BLKJ Havas was the most-decorated agency with 16 metals, including the Grand Prix and five Gold wins. Grab Creative Studio and TBWA\Singapore each won six metals, while BBH Singapore earned five. Among brands, Income Insurance was the most awarded with 10 metals.

The inaugural Grand Prix was presented to “Brewlander AI Irresponsibly”, developed by BLKJ Havas for Brewlander, for the most awarded campaign of the night. The campaign also won the David & Goliath Award, which recognised the campaign’s outsized impact despite a fraction of the budget of its competitors. The campaign printed AI text prompts on billboards, coasters, and social media, inviting audiences to generate their own cinematic beer commercials. It resulted in a 32% increase in spontaneous brand awareness and 15% year-on-year sales growth.

During a sharing session at the Effie Singapore Learning Festival, Brewlander founder John Wei and BLKJ Havas Chief Client Officer Vivien Foo attributed the campaign’s success to the strength of the client-agency partnership and the decision to give consumers creative control, turning participation itself into a competitive advantage.

“Great effectiveness comes from going beyond the surface. This year’s Grand Prix campaign had a fraction of the budget of its competitors and outperformed all of them. That is the standard Effie exists to recognise,” said Dhiren Amin, Co-Chair, Effie Singapore Awards 2026, and Chief Customer Officer, Income Insurance Singapore.

Among the Gold winners, Income Insurance’s “Child Secure Project”, developed by BBH Singapore, stood out for the breadth of its recognition, taking Gold in the Marketing Disruptors category and earning additional medals across Social Good and Insurance. The campaign, which built Singapore’s first insurer-supported counselling ecosystem for children of critically ill parents, was also one of the most discussed presentations of the Effie Singapore Learning Festival.

Effie Singapore Learning Festival
The awards night complemented the Effie Singapore Learning Festival earlier in the day, where nine winners were able to share their campaign strategies with close to 650 industry leaders, marketing professionals, and representatives from local and regional institutions. Alongside keynote sessions from TBWA\Auckland, Leo India and Ogilvy Vietnam, the teams unpacked how they drove effectiveness, from interrupting established behaviours and using AI to solve genuine constraints, to grounding strategy in human observation rather than trend data.

Grab Creative Studio and Grab presented “Awwbandon Cart”, a CRM campaign that gave abandoned cart items emotional personalities at scale, lifting conversion on the first message from 9% to 31.5%.

Leo Singapore and McDonald’s shared how “McGriddles® GriddleCore A.M. Fest,” grounded in ethnographic fieldwork rather than trend reports, drove a 10% increase in launch impact versus its previous campaign, and a 17% uplift in average campaign sales.

Mediacorp and FairPrice Group unpacked how “The Untold Story of FairPrice CNY Freshness” tackled a perception problem rather than a product one, translating supply chain advantages into quotable, shareable cues delivered through trusted personalities, lifting purchase intent significantly and driving fresh pork sales by a double-digit percentage over the campaign period.

Ogilvy Singapore and the Singapore Police Force walked through how “Breaking the Cognitive Glitch” was built as a cognitive circuit-breaker,through a memorable jingle and the ScamShield 1799 helpline, that reversed an eight-year upward trend in scam cases.

TBWA\Singapore and Health Promotion Board showcased how “Salt Buries True Flavours” reframed sodium reduction as sensory recovery through heritage storytelling, generating over 22 million video views and motivating more than two million Singaporeans to reduce their salt intake.

The Secret Little Agency and Klook presented “The Best You”, casting Marie Kondo as someone publicly navigating imperfection, a transformation story that resulted in Klook becoming the most-searched brand in its category upon entering a new market.

VML Singapore and the Ministry of Home Affairs rounded off the sessions with how “SGSecure Jolted Singaporeans into Action by Infiltrating their Feeds” tackled a paradox – rising awareness but falling intent to act. Rather than disrupting social feeds with warnings, the campaign disguised anti-terror messages as native content through a reality-style web series and trend-driven videos, reversing a dangerous rise in public inaction.

As the industry continues to evolve, the Effie Singapore Awards and the Effie Learning Festival remain twin pillars of Singapore’s effectiveness culture – one celebrating the work that sets the standard, the other ensuring those lessons reach the whole community.

For the full list of Effie Singapore Awards 2026 winners, click here.