D&AD handed out four Black Pencils at its London ceremony. Isle of Any took two for Coinbase Your Way Out in VFX and Production Design: a live-action film built to look like a game through costume and choreography. Publicis Conseil won Impact for AXA's Three Words. Uncommon Creative Studio London took Art Direction for The Ordinary's Periodic Fable, and was named Advertising Agency of the Year.
Periodic Fable is not an AI campaign. It is craft aimed at beauty jargon that already read like empty copy long before generative tools. Uncommon and The Ordinary built a 49-term parody of the periodic table, checked with scientists so each buzzword had no regulated basis, then rolled it out in stark monochrome design and a film by Olivia De Camps for Smuggler. Creative Boom frames it as the anti-slop case: human writing and art direction rewarded when the category is drowning in filler language.
