LIA 2026: IMPACT BBDO is MEA Agency of the Year, AnNahar top brand.
The London International Awards has named IMPACT BBDO its Middle East and Africa Agency of the Year for 2026, with AnNahar Newspaper taking Regional Brand of the Year. VML was Regional Network of the Year.
The regional list also gave MSL the Regional PR Network of the Year title and Zenith Regional Media Network of the Year. Campaign Middle East reports that the results followed the awards' 41st judging, held over ten days at Encore at Wynn in Las Vegas.
IMPACT BBDO's win rests on two campaigns. The Untaught History Edition, made for AnNahar, won the first Grand LIA in the newly introduced Democracy and Human Rights category, plus several Gold and Silver awards. It turns more than eight decades of the newspaper's archives into an independently verified history resource, answering the lack of a single account of Lebanon's modern history in school curricula. The second, Limitless Learning, was made for Google Gemini. Campaign ME says this is the third time in five years that the agency has taken the regional Agency of the Year title.
Globally, Ogilvy was named Network of the Year, Heineken Client/Marketer of the Year, Nestlé KitKat Brand of the Year and VML UK, London Agency of the Year. LIA gave out 26 Grand LIAs in total, five of them in new categories: Business Transformation, Democracy and Human Rights, Entertainment and Content, Gaming and Sports.
The report is from a single outlet, and it does not list the Gold, Silver or Bronze winners outside these titles, so the full Middle East tally is still to come. For Saudi and Gulf agencies, the signal is where the regional prizes went this season: a Lebanon-based brand and a Dubai-led network, not a Riyadh office.
Why it matters
LIA rewarded a public-interest idea over a product campaign, a pattern marketers in the region can use when choosing what to enter or commission.
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