We announced our 2025 winners on 27th November at a virtual ceremony, and it did what it needed to do. When this year's dates were confirmed, and I saw an address printed underneath them, I felt something lift. On 8th October 2026, the MIXX Awards Europe ceremony takes place at Felix Meritis, in Amsterdam, from 16:00 to 19:00 Amsterdam time, and the winners will be read out with the people who made the work sitting in front of us.
People ask me what a ticket to the ceremony actually buys, which is a fair question in a year when every travel budget is counted twice over. I have four answers, and none of them is the trophy.
The first is the work. What arrives in Amsterdam on 8th October is a year of Europe's most ambitious digital advertising, gathered in one place and seen at its best. The 2026 shortlist went live on 2nd September, and it is worth half an hour of anyone's time: campaigns category by category, with the agencies and teams behind them named alongside. Twenty-four categories take in emerging tech, Retail Media, creator campaigns, gaming, CTV, digital audio, out of home and social, a spread wide enough that reading it end to end is the closest any of us gets to a survey of what this industry actually made this year. For a sense of the standard being cleared, last year's winners are still online and hold up. On the night, the Gold, Silver, Bronze and Grand Prix winners are revealed live on stage, with every Gold going automatically into the running for the Grand Prix, so nobody knows how the evening ends before it is said out loud.
The second is the people, and the format has been built around them on purpose. This is not a sit-down dinner, and there is no procession of courses to sit through while the person you came to talk to is stranded three tables away. Doors open at 16:00 with drinks, nibbles and a magician working the arrival, and the ceremony begins at 16:30. Food and drink run through the whole evening, so the conversations can run through it too. The agencies, brands, national federations and judges who move this industry forward are in one place for a few hours, which happens far less often than you might expect, given how much of what we do depends on knowing one another. Plenty of the names on that shortlist know each other's work far better than they know each other, and an evening with real time built into it is how that gets fixed.
The third is the recognition, a moment to mark the ideas that shaped the year and the teams behind them. Much of what sits behind a single entry never becomes visible from a seat in the audience. Twenty-four judges scored every entry against strategy, creative and results; the totals decided which work made the shortlist, and then they met to talk the closest calls through and agree the winners category by category. Those are real hours, given by people with demanding jobs of their own, and the discussion is more rigorous than anyone outside it imagines. The teams who entered backed their own work enough to put it in front of a European jury, which takes a kind of nerve that does not get acknowledged nearly often enough. There are individual awards on the night as well, for creative directors, art directors, copywriters, strategists and media specialists. They are decided on points accumulated across the competition, a deliberate way of recognising people whose names sit some distance from the credit. This year's theme is Once In, Always In. Made to belong. Built to last. That is a fair description of what I have watched happen for years, because a MIXX Award stays with the people who earned it long after the evening is over.
The fourth is the field, and it is the one I find hardest to explain to anyone who has not been. For one night, the standard of digital advertising being made across Europe is set side by side, with work from markets that rarely see each other's output placed in the same categories and held to the same three criteria. A campaign from a small market can sit alongside one from a market many times its size and be judged on the same terms, which is a rarer comparison than it sounds. You come away with a precise sense of where your own work sits, and of which markets are doing something you had not thought to try. Most of the people I speak to afterwards remember that part far longer than they remember who won, and a good number change something about how they brief, pitch or measure the following year.
One thing sits outside those four answers, and it belongs to the calendar. The Retail Media Impact Summit takes place in the same building on 7th October 2026, its second edition, run by IAB Europe with VIA, the Dutch trade association for the marketing and media industry. The two days answer different halves of the same question. The summit is the commercial half, a full day on where Retail Media goes now that the first rush of growth has settled, with retailers, advertisers, tech partners and policy leaders working through it together. The ceremony the next evening is the creative half, the year's standard set out in public with the work named and the teams credited. I get something different from each of them. I leave the summit with a sharper sense of where the money is moving and what the market will ask for next year, and I leave the ceremony knowing what people can make once that expectation meets a good idea. Two consecutive days holding both halves is rare, and I would take it while it is here.
Tickets are on sale now, with a members' rate alongside general admission, and anyone holding a summit ticket can email communication@iabeurope.eu for a discount code towards one. The practical side is easily handled, and it is not the reason to come. You do not need to be shortlisted to come along, and a good number of the best conversations on these evenings belong to people who came to see the work and to stand among those who made it. On 8th October a year of this industry's best thinking will be named out loud at Felix Meritis, with the people who made it there to hear it. I would be very glad if you were there too.
