Three Gold ADDYs and a Silver at the 2025 American Advertising Awards

Digital Spark won four ADDYs in the 2025 American Advertising Awards: three Gold and one Silver. Our showreel won Gold at the Charlotte competition and then won Gold again at the District 3 level. The Centrios App, an animated explainer for the building access brand, won Gold. And What If?, our national spot for Carnegie Mellon University, won Silver.

Here is how the competition works, and the work behind each award.

How the ADDYs work

The American Advertising Awards, the ADDYs, are run by the American Advertising Federation. AAF Charlotte describes them as the advertising industry’s largest and most representative competition, and they run in three tiers.

The first is local. In Charlotte, AAF Charlotte runs the competition for work produced in the city. Judges score every entry against a nationally regulated scale and award the best work Gold or Silver. Work that places locally moves on to the district, which for us is District 3, covering Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina. District winners go forward to the national stage.

So a Gold at District 3 means a piece won locally and then won again against the best work from three states. That is what happened to our showreel. The District 3 results and the Charlotte winners book are both published by the AAF.

Gold, twice: the Digital Spark showreel

Our showreel won Gold in Advertising and Media Industry Self-Promotion at the Charlotte awards, then Gold in the same category, Self-Promotion Film, at District 3.

A showreel has an unusual job. It is the first piece of our work most prospective clients see, often before a single conversation, and it has to make the case for three disciplines at once: live action, photography and animation. It cannot lean on one client’s story. It has to show range and taste in a couple of minutes and leave someone wanting to see more.

That makes it harder to cut than it looks. Every project we include has to earn its place against the others, and the pacing has to carry someone from a 3D product launch to a brand film without a jolt. Winning twice, against agency and studio work across three states, tells us the cut does its job. You can watch it from the Showreel button at the top of our homepage.

Gold: The Centrios App

The Centrios App won Gold in Animation, Special Effects or Motion Graphics, with Peter Godshall credited as Lead Animator.

Centrios, an ASSA ABLOY brand, launched into a crowded market with software and hardware that had to be understood before it could be wanted. The platform lets a small business manage access to its building from anywhere: who can open which door, and when. We built Centrios a series of explainers with one job each, and this film’s job was the app itself.

Software is hard to film. A screen recording shows buttons, not consequences. So the film builds a world instead: a clean 3D city of shops, offices and doors, connected by lines of light to a phone, so the viewer sees what a tap in the app actually does across a whole business. It is the kind of explanation animation does better than anything else, which we wrote about in selling a product nobody can see.

The film is one part of a wider body of work for Centrios. The Smart Lock launch film, which won a Silver ADDY the year before, introduced the hardware. A separate explainer covers the subscription plans. Each film has one job, so a small business owner can understand any single piece of the platform without sitting through the rest.

Silver: What If? for Carnegie Mellon

What If? won Silver in Film, Video and Sound for a Single Spot up to two minutes. The credits are Johnny Andow, Director; Adam Sewell, Executive Producer; Josh Acuff, Producer; and Matt Batchelor, Director of Photography.

Carnegie Mellon wanted a spot strong enough to set the standard for its whole video brand, and specifically not the usual university anthem of drone shots and students under a tree. We brought two concepts to university leadership, and CMU’s president chose What If? because it matched the curiosity the university selects for. The :30 premiered nationally during the 2023 Tony Awards broadcast and became the foundation of a full campaign.

It had already won two Tellys, a Silver from the judges and a People’s Telly Silver from the public vote, which we cover in What If? wins two Tellys for Carnegie Mellon.

What the three have in common

Three different disciplines won: a self-promotion film, a 3D software explainer and a live-action brand spot. That is the point of running motion, stills and animation under one roof. The same leadership, the same standards and the same process carry across every format.

Each piece also started from a clear job. The showreel had to make the case for the studio. The Centrios App had to make software visible. What If? had to show possibility rather than inventory. Awards follow from getting that job right, not the other way round.

Where to see the work

All of our awards are listed in the Recognition section of our homepage, with links to each project and to the official results. The projects themselves, with the briefs and the films, are on the Centrios and Carnegie Mellon pages.

If you are planning work you would want to put forward for an award, the conversation starts the same way as any other project: what does it have to do, and for whom.