The Best of Show is the top honour a Marketing Awards jury can give, and at this year’s gala on Tuesday was twice as nice for a pair of agencies.

Broken Heart Love Affair won two Best of Show awards – one in the Advertising category, the other in Craft – for “Immortal,” a campaign for the Royal Ontario Museum that aimed to modernize its image by frankly showing how both the good and bad parts of history impacted contemporary issues younger audiences were interested in.

Also taking two Best of Show awards was Performance Art. The agency’s “Black Elevation Map” for travel agency Black & Abroad included an interactive map that visualized over 330 million points of data on population distribution, Black-owned businesses and cultural institutions. The map helped deliver on Black & Abroad’s goal of curating Black-centric travel experiences, while also giving travellers a tool to help them support Black-owned businesses and attractions while on their journeys. The campaign took the top prize in the Multicultural and Digital categories.

No Fixed Address won Public Service Best of Show for Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s “Unwanted Film Festival.” The campaign involved using AI to create posters for content no one wanted to see: child sexual abuse material. The posters were used to draw awareness to the alarming increase the Canadian Centre for Child Protection has observed in the rate of this material being uploaded online, roughly once every two seconds.

Citizen Relations also won a Public Service Best of Show in the Multicultural category for “ReclaimYourName.dic.” The campaign, created for non-profit Elmin8Hate, addressed how many Asian Canadians adopt Anglicized names in an effort to fit in, but which tends to lead to feelings of losing their identity. The agency created a Microsoft Word plugin that included 8,000 names from more than a dozen countries, which would stop the word processor from thinking Asian names were typos and helping Asian Canadians improve their sense of belonging.

Rethink won the most awards overall this year, including 14 Golds for work with Kraft Heinz, Scotiabank, YWCA Metro Vancouver, IKEA and Penguin Random House.

Several campaign were also recognized with M for Mpact awards, a special jury prize awarded to a bold, creatively compelling campaign or program that takes an active stance in championing societal change and advancing equality.

One M for Mpact award was given to Performance Art by the Design jury, adding to the award haul for “The Black Elevation Map.” Two other M for Mpact awards – one from the Craft jury, another from the Advertising jury – went to BBDO for “Missing Matoaka,” a campaign for Muskrat Magazine the aimed to more accurately tell the story of Matoaka, the girl more commonly referred to in history and culture as Pocahontas. It involved creating an alternative audio track for the animated film that corrected romanticized depictions of Pocahontas that has shaped false narratives about Indigenous women and obstructed real-world events and harms.

Finally, the Digital jury awarded an M for Mpact award to Edelman’s “Keep The Grey” for Dove. The campaign was launched in the wake of news anchor Lisa LaFlamme’s firing from CTV. Among the reports about Bell Media’s newsroom culture that surfaced in the aftermath was a claim that the company’s head of news raised questions about allowing LaFlamme to have grey hair on the air. The campaign aimed to celebrate women going grey and not holding themselves to unfair beauty standards with a series of black-and-white photographs declaring that “grey is beautiful.”

Also recognized at Tuesday’s gala were this year’s Hall of Marketing Gold inductees: Frank Palmer (inducted by Patty Jones, former president of DDB Canada and currently president of PS&Co., and Bob Stamnes, Palmer’s business partner in PS&Co.), Judy John (inducted by David Moore, former president and CEO of Leo Burnett Canada) and Don Watt (inducted posthumously by Steve Mykolyn).

The full list of winners can be found on the Marketing Awards website.