The advertising industry has always had a complicated relationship with credit. For decades, the convention was to name a single creative director, a lone genius whose vision supposedly sprang fully formed from some mysterious wellspring of inspiration. The teams who actually made the work — the strategists, the account managers, the people who stayed late arguing about kerning — were acknowledged, if at all, in agate type.

Adweek is now accepting submissions for its 2026 Team Visionary Awards, which take the opposite approach.

The program, which carries no entry fee, recognizes groups rather than individuals across sixteen categories. These range from the expected (agency creative teams, media planning and buying units) to the increasingly essential (creator marketing teams, technology and innovation groups) to the perennially undersung (human resources departments, which Adweek politely calls "People/HR Teams").

"It takes a village — or rather, a team," the trade publication noted in its announcement, deploying a phrase that has appeared in approximately eleven thousand award-show marketing materials since 1996.

The categories reflect the current fragmentation of the business with some precision. There are separate recognitions for in-house brand social media teams and agency social media teams, a distinction that would have been meaningless fifteen years ago and is now the subject of considerable territorial anxiety on both sides. There is also a split between "Legacy Leadership Teams," for companies established before January 2021, and "Breakthrough Leadership Teams," for those founded after — a dividing line that falls, not coincidentally, right at the pandemic's inflection point.

(One notes that repeat winners in the same category are prohibited, which suggests either a commitment to spreading recognition around or a pragmatic acknowledgment that the same holding company units tend to dominate these things.)

The deadline for submissions is December 11, 2026. The awards themselves will presumably follow at some later date, celebrated by teams.

Original story published in Adweek: "Entries Open for ADWEEK Team Visionary Awards 2027"