ADC 105th Annual Awards Launches with Dazzling Campaign from Dentsu Tokyo

Sep. 11, 2025

The Art Directors Club, part of The One Club for Creativity, has kicked off the prestigious global ADC 105th Annual Awards, supported by the striking “Create a Beautiful Future” call-for-entries campaign from Dentsu Tokyo.

Founded in 1920, the ADC Annual Awards is the world’s longest continuously running awards program to recognize global excellence in craft and innovation in all forms of advertising and design.  

Entries can be submitted now, with fees increasing after each deadline period.  Regular deadline is January 23, 2026, with extended deadline of February 6, 2026, and final deadline February 20, 2026.

This year’s global ADC Annual Awards launches with a dazzling call for entries campaign created by Dentsu Tokyo.

Titled “Create a Beautiful Future”, the campaign highlights The One Club’s status as a global nonprofit organization which, unlike for-profit awards shows, takes revenue generated from its awards shows and puts it back into the industry to fund a range of professional development, education, and diversity programs.

The centerpiece visual of a magnificent peacock represents the notion of courtship and putting on a show in order to attract attention.  By displaying their beautiful talents and work in the form of entries into the ADC 105th Annual Awards, entrants can help “create a beautiful future” for the industry by funding year-round global programming from The One Club.

The Dentsu creative team saw the famed ADC Cube not as a symbol of individual glory, but as a gathering of love for design at ADC.  With that in mind, they built the peacock entirely from Cubes, expressing how 105 years of accumulated love for design creates new chemistry and leads to a more beautiful future.  

The peacock stands for pride, authority, beauty, and flight. Its magnificent feathers are a symbol of courtship, just as a call-for-entries can be seen as an act of courtship for creators.  Its feathers are structural color, shifting with the angle of light, reflecting how design mirrors the changes of society and embraces diverse perspectives.

Yoshihiro Yagi, ECD, Dentsu Tokyo said:

"ADC President Brian Collins recently said of the organization ‘We are not preserving a tradition. The history of The Art Directors Club is not a weight — it’s an engine for the future.’  Those words deeply resonated with us."

 

He explained:

“With that same spirit, we created this visual where entries of creators from around the world transcend language and culture. As they layer onto the ADC’s long and deep 105-year history, they spark new chemical reactions —and begin to shape a beautiful new landscape for the industries of the future. That storyline came to us quite naturally.”

 

Yagi said the team chose the famed ADC Cube as the campaign’s central motif, but internationally rendered through a two-dimensional lens, connecting and composing it as graphic design.  The layering of these graphic elements represents the chemical reactions the creative team imagined, and from that interplay, the image of a peacock — a universal symbol of courtship — begins to emerge.

Yagi added:

“Personally, the moment that I saw this not just as 3D or 2D, but as a whole new dimension — “D (Infinity D)” — I felt a real spark of excitement. It’s something we can hand to the next generation of creative professionals, in harmony with the spirit of the ADC.  In that context, I feel even the meaning of the phrase ‘call for entries’ begins to shift. It becomes something deeper.”

 

Dentsu Tokyo is well-qualified to develop the campaign, having landed as the ADC #1 ranked APAC agency in 2021, 2023, and 2024, and #2 in 2022 and 2025.  

New for ADC 105th Annual Awards

This year’s awards will include the presentation of the Paul Manship Medal, now reimagined as an enterable category recognizing a single designer who best acts as a catalyst for change, demonstrates foresight and innovation, embodies a lasting legacy, and made the most significant contribution in the past year.

Other noteworthy changes for 2026 include the separation of Health & Wellness and Pharma into two distinct disciplines, and addition of four new categories for Film & Moving Image, Motion & Graphic Design, Experiential & Interactive, and Digital & Emerging Media within the Artificial Intelligence discipline.

Tiered pricing

A special tiered pricing structure makes it easier for smaller agencies, studios and freelancers to participate.  Larger agencies and brands pay the standard entry fee; smaller shops get a discount on entries (amount varies by discipline), while freelancers and one-person shops are eligible for an even greater reduction in their entry fee.

ADC 105th  Annual Awards Jury Presidents will be announced in October and the full jury announced in January, with judging taking place in March 2026.  Finalists — all entries winning Gold, Silver, Bronze or Merit — will be announced early April, with winners unveiled at the ADC 105th Annual Awards ceremony during The One Club’s Creative Week 2026 in New York in May.