In this blog post, our Marketing & Events Director, Amy Mazzola, shares what’s new for the 2026 MIXX Awards Europe, why the changes matter, and what entrants should consider before submitting their work.
Every year, I get asked some version of the same question by people thinking about entering the MIXX Awards Europe: what's actually changed? Most of the time, the honest answer is "the categories have been tidied up a bit." This year, I can give a different answer.
We've made three changes to the 2026 edition that go beyond housekeeping, and each one reflects something we've been hearing from the industry for a while now.
After several years running the ceremony virtually, the 2026 winners will be announced in person, at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, on 8th October. I won't pretend this was a small decision. Virtual ceremonies are easier to produce and easier for people to attend from anywhere. But they also flatten something that matters in this industry: the moment when a room full of people who've spent a year competing against each other stops competing for an evening and just celebrates the work.
If you've entered before and only experienced MIXX through a livestream, this is the year to come and see what the room actually feels like.
The biggest shift this year is structural, not cosmetic. We've reorganised the categories around five pillars: Technology & Innovation, AI, Content/Creators & Experience, Impact/Purpose & Effectiveness, and Media Environments.
The pillar I'd point to first is AI, because it's the clearest signal of how much the entry pool has changed. AI used to be one ingredient in a campaign, worth a mention in a broader technology category. It is now central enough to deserve four categories of its own, recognising AI used for creativity, for campaign effectiveness, for optimisation, and for genuine innovation. If your work this year leaned on AI in a way that shaped the strategy or the output, there is now a category built specifically to judge it on those terms, rather than asking it to compete against entries doing something entirely different with the budget.
We've also introduced Innovative Collaboration, recognising partnerships between brands, agencies, platforms and technology providers that produced something none of them could have built alone. That category exists because some of the strongest entries we've seen over the years weren't single-agency wins. They were the result of three or four organisations doing something none of them could have pulled off solo, and our old structure never had anywhere clear to put that.
Alongside the campaign categories, we've added individual recognition: Creative Director, Art Director, Copywriter, Strategist and Media Specialist of the Year. These sit next to the also new Creative Agency of the Year and are calculated the same way, on a cumulative points system across every campaign someone has contributed to during the competition. The thinking behind it is straightforward: the people behind excellence deserve recognition.
If you entered in 2025, the practical takeaway is this: read the new category descriptions before assuming your campaign fits where it used to. The reorganisation means a handful of entries that fit a certain category last year may sit better elsewhere or in multiple categories this year.
The third change is less visible from the outside but matters just as much if you're the one filling in the entry form. We've built a brand new, bespoke platform to streamline the submission process this year, to make it faster and more intuitive to get a campaign entered, particularly if you're submitting across multiple categories. Entries opened on 8th June 2026, and the deadline to submit entries is 24th July.
Some things are deliberately the same. National MIXX entry remains the qualifying route into MIXX Awards Europe, judging still runs through the same Gold, Silver, Bronze structure with Gold winners automatically entered into the Grand Prix, and the standard we ask entrants to meet, real strategy, real creative craft, real measurable results, hasn't moved an inch.
This year's theme is ‘Once In, Always In. Made to belong. Built to last.’ It's there because the categories may have changed shape, but what we're actually celebrating hasn't: work that holds up, teams that built it, and an industry willing to put it in front of its peers and be judged.
The categories will keep evolving as the industry does. What won't change is what it means to make the list: proof that the work stood up, on its own merits, against the best Europe produced this year. That's worth entering for, whichever pillar your campaign belongs in.
Entries for the 2026 MIXX Awards Europe are open now, with the deadline to submit being 24th July 2026. Enter today because ‘Once In, Always In’.
