Creative
awards
Bridgeman Images Creative Awards 2025: this year we celebrate the power of art in advertising, design, and commercial creativity. The 2025 edition challenged creatives to transform history into bold, visionary campaigns.
Welcome to the Bridgeman Images Creative Awards 2025, where we celebrate the transformative power of art in advertising, product design and commercial creative projects. Our mission is to honour the use of art, culture, and history in the work of commercial creatives.
We invited artists, designers, marketers, and creative professionals worldwide to participate.
FIRST PLACE
Luca Cantavenera & Jessica Basilico
In Italy today, drug use among young people is rising at an alarming rate - with over 960,000* students aged 18 to 24 having tried drugs at least once. Yet, at the same time, a more hopeful trend is emerging: cultural participation among this same age group is on the rise. In fact, 33.6%* of young Italians have visited a museum recently, marking a major resurgence after years of decline.
This duality was the starting point for STUPEFACENTE, an inventive, thought-provoking campaign by the fictional Italian association FuoridiCultura. The organisation was created to spark conversations around preventing drug use through the transformative power of culture.
The campaign is built on a powerful insight: for many young people growing up in vulnerable or isolated environments, drugs can seem like the only escape. But culture, in all its forms, offers a different path. One filled with beauty, creativity, and the power to reimagine the future. Art, museums, technology: these aren’t just pastimes, they can become antidotes.
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The title STUPEFACENTE plays on a clever Italian double meaning, it refers both to narcotics and to something astonishing or extraordinary. The campaign brings this duality to life by using AI to remix classical masterpieces into surreal, dreamlike images that feel intoxicating, but are created through art, not substances.Each image feels like a hallucination, a strange, compelling vision. But instead of stemming from drugs, it’s the imagination, creativity, and cultural heritage of humanity doing the heavy lifting. The result? A powerful message: you don’t need to escape through drugs when you can escape through art.
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STUPEFACENTE stands as a bold reminder that culture is not just for the privileged or academic, it’s a tool for healing, empowerment, and social change. By harnessing the aesthetics of drug-induced imagery and subverting it with high art and AI, the campaign captures the attention of youth in a language they understand, and offers them a different way out.
"A standout for its originality, Stupefacente uses humour, beauty, and imagination to present a compelling argument for cultural engagement. Its use of archival imagery is both playful and profound - the kind of future-facing creativity we hoped to see."
- Martin Hasselbring (Judge)
"We are truly proud and delighted to have received this recognition. For us, art and technology are a “mind-blowing” mix - the very same that inspired us all the way through to the creative solution. The idea allowed us to use a sharp tone of voice and a visual treatment capable of capturing attention, while the insight guided us in developing an integrated campaign, from traditional media to on-the-ground activations, all the way to digital and social adaptations."
- Luca Cantavenera & Jessica Basilico (Winners)
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Jessica Basilico
Luca Cantavenera
Second PLACE
Andrea Cauteruccio & Andrea Molteni
What happens when abundance disappears?
In The Extinctionism, Andrea Cauteruccio and Andrea Molteni take us on a stark visual journey into a future shaped by environmental neglect. Inspired by rising concerns about climate change and the alarming depletion of Earth’s natural resources, especially the devastating effects on fruit crops - this integrated campaign reimagines art history through a powerful contemporary lens.
The artists selected iconic still life paintings, long celebrated for their lush displays of fruit and bounty, and removed the fruit entirely. The result is a collection of familiar artworks transformed into eerie visions of absence. By stripping these masterpieces of their central subject, the campaign creates a jarring visual metaphor for the vanishing richness of our natural world.Using the archive as both medium and message, The Extinctionism bridges the cultural past and our environmental present with haunting precision. As one judge noted, “It cleverly weaponises familiarity, using renowned images from the visual archive to force us to reckon with scarcity. It’s a concept that speaks fluently through art history, and lands with haunting relevance."
The campaign extended beyond gallery walls, appearing in Digital Out-of-Home placements to reach a wider public. Striking visuals of fruitless paintings disrupted daily routines, bringing the message of ecological urgency into urban environments.
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Through minimal intervention and maximum impact, The Extinctionism reminds us: the future of the planet lies not just in science or policy, but in the power of creative storytelling.
"Using the archive as both medium and message, ‘The Extinctionism’ delivers a haunting meditation on the fragility of our natural world. A thoughtful, well-crafted campaign that bridges past and future with visual precision."
- Giordano Curreri (Judge)
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Andrea Cauteruccio
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Andrea Molteni
Third PLACE
Shadé Addams
In a world increasingly shaped by misinformation, lost data, and digital overload, What Will Remain? asks a haunting question: how do we remember, when the systems designed to preserve memory begin to fail?
Created by Birmingham-based artist and designer Shadé Addams, this visual campaign is imagined as a corrupted archival recovery file - a fragmented collection of cultural icons and incomplete histories. Using recognisable imagery from the Bridgeman Images archive, Addams reworks major historical moments into ghostly, glitched-out visuals: Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, Einstein’s blackboard, suffragette protests, and even Liberty herself.
Each image appears “recovered,” but only partially. Gaps, glitches, and digital decay interrupt the narrative, reflecting a world in which records are altered, history is forgotten, and truth is under threat. File names like corrupted_memory, attempt_retrieval, and retrieval_failed reinforce the sense of loss and technological fragility.With a striking design language drawn from military terminals, archival systems, and surveillance UIs, What Will Remain? blends art and warning.
As one judge noted, “This project demonstrates a sophisticated visual intelligence and conceptual clarity. By fragmenting recognisable moments in history, it forces us to confront the fragility of truth in the digital age.”
By creatively distorting the archive itself, Addams doesn’t just respond to the brief, she turns it inside out. The result is a visceral reminder: if we don’t actively protect our stories, we risk forgetting them entirely.
"‘What Will Remain?’ excels in its inventive manipulation of archival material to provoke critical reflection on memory and misinformation. A brilliant example of how historical images can be recontextualised with both artistic finesse and cultural urgency."
- Antoinette Lisser (Judge)
"I’m truly honoured to be one of the winners of this year’s Bridgeman Creative Awards. It is deeply affirming to have my own voice recognised. My sincere thanks to Bridgeman Images for creating a platform that supports artists, and to the judging panel for viewing my work with openness and without bias. I hope it starts a conversation about our shared humanity, and the stories we choose to preserve in the digital age."
- Shadé Addams (Winner)
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Shadé Addams
The
Brief
"Reimagine the Future"
This year’s awards celebrate work that blends historical perspectives with future-forward ideas, using creativity to inspire innovative solutions for a better tomorrow.
Create a campaign concept (with a minimum of 3 visual elements, eg. OOH, video, print, social media, branding, collateral, etc.) that inspires people to rethink and reimagine what the future could look like. It could tackle themes like technology’s role in society, sustainability, or equality, and use Bridgeman Images’ archive to connect past and future ideas.
Use a curated selection from Bridgeman Images’ extensive archive of historical and cultural content to craft a campaign that connects the past with future possibilities. Whether it’s a brand promoting technological advancements, a cause pushing for social progress, or a campaign envisioning sustainable living, explore how the lessons of history can shape and inspire a new future narrative.
This can be on behalf of your own company or a fictional company or brand. No trademarks to be used without permission.
THE
PANEL
about
Bridgeman
images
Bridgeman Images is the world's leading image licensing agency for fine art, cultural and historical content.
We help creatives produce award-winning work, by licensing images and videos from thousands of the world’s most prestigious museums, collections, contemporary artists, and photographers. Our clients benefit from a simple, fast, reliable service and comprehensive advice on all aspects of copyright and licensing.
With offices in London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Milan, we are one of the world’s oldest image licensing agencies and have been clearing copyright and reproduction rights on behalf of artists and artists' estates since 1972.
