“AAG’s special client award recognises the brands behind great advertising as MAGGI’s breadth of award-winning work puts the Nestlé Ghana brand ahead of a strong field”
MAGGI, one of Nestlé Ghana’s flagship food brands, has been crowned Brand of the Year at the 18th Gong Gong Festival of Creativity & Awards, emerging as the best-performing individual brand across the 2026 Gong Gong awards results.
The honour was presented as one of the ultimate People & Industry Awards at the Gong Gong Awards held at the Omanye Hall of the Labadi Beach Hotel on Saturday, 22 August 2026.
MAGGI finished the competition with five metals — two Gold, one Silver and two Bronze awards — across five different areas of advertising excellence, placing it ahead of a competitive group of brands that included MoMo, Nescafé, Absa, Tidal Rave, Coca-Cola, MTN, Club Beer, GTP and MILO.
The result was particularly significant because Brand of the Year was not determined by a separate campaign entered specifically for the ultimate award. Instead, it recognised the cumulative performance of a brand’s work across the Gong Gong Awards.
Under the 2026 methodology, the total number of awards won by a brand was the primary consideration, with Gold, Silver and Bronze used in that order as tie-breakers. On that basis, MAGGI’s five awards placed it clearly ahead of MoMo and Nescafé, which recorded three awards each, and Absa, which also accumulated three Bronze awards.
Why AAG Introduced Brand of the Year
The Brand of the Year award reflects an important evolution in the philosophy of the Gong Gong Awards.
Advertising awards have traditionally placed considerable emphasis on agencies, creatives and the execution of individual campaigns. While that recognition remains central to the Gong Gongs, the Advertising Association of Ghana and the Gong Gong Awards Board recognise that great advertising cannot exist without clients who are prepared to invest in, approve and champion great ideas.
The Gong Gong Awards had already begun strengthening this philosophy with the introduction of client awards intended to recognise collaborative and supportive client-agency relationships. The 2026 awards architecture formally positioned Brand of the Year as a Client Award under the People & Industry category alongside Agency of the Year.
The thinking behind the award is simple but important: when an advertising campaign wins, the agency deserves recognition for the strategy, creativity and execution, but the client deserves recognition for creating the conditions that allowed that work to happen.
Strong creative work often requires a client to:
- provide a clear commercial or brand challenge;
- trust its agency partners;
- give creative teams space to explore unconventional ideas;
- commit sufficient resources to bring ideas to life;
- take calculated creative risks;
- understand its consumers and culture;
- support innovation and experimentation; and
- remain committed to consistent brand building rather than isolated advertising activity.
Brand of the Year therefore recognises creative leadership on the client side of the advertising relationship.
It also sends an important message to Ghana’s corporate community: the Gong Gong Awards are not simply awards for advertising agencies. They celebrate the entire ecosystem responsible for building successful brands.
For AAG, this is particularly important because raising the standard of Ghanaian advertising requires both better agencies and braver, more creatively ambitious clients.
Why MAGGI Won
MAGGI’s victory was ultimately about more than collecting the largest number of trophies.
Its results demonstrated breadth, consistency and versatility across very different advertising disciplines.
The five awards attributed to MAGGI were:
| Campaign | Category | Metal |
| MAGGI Mami | Best Use of AI & Creative Tech | Gold |
| MAGGI Taste of Christmas | Best Film | Gold |
| MAGGI Esther and Tara | Best Integrated Campaign | Silver |
| MAGGI Taste of Christmas | Cultural Impact | Bronze |
| MAGGI Taste of Christmas | Excellence in Media Strategy | Bronze |
The official consolidated results therefore gave MAGGI 2 Gold, 1 Silver and 2 Bronze medals — five awards in total.
That spread is important in understanding why the brand emerged at the top.
MAGGI was not strong in only one type of advertising
The brand won in Craft, Digital & Technology, Integrated Campaign, Purpose & Impact and Media.
That means its performance was recognised from several different perspectives.
Its work demonstrated creative execution through film, integrated thinking across channels, technology-led innovation, cultural relevance and media strategy.
That breadth separated MAGGI from brands whose wins were more concentrated within one or two areas.
Technology: MAGGI Mami Takes Gold
One of MAGGI’s strongest results came from MAGGI Mami, which won Gold for Best Use of AI & Creative Tech.
The campaign had scored strongly during the shortlist stage, receiving an average juror rating of 70.6 in the category.
The significance of this win extended beyond the individual trophy.
The 2026 Gong Gong Festival was organised under the theme “The Creative Convergence: AI and Human Craft in Advertising.”
For the eventual Brand of the Year to win Gold in the category most directly connected to that theme was therefore particularly appropriate.
It demonstrated that a long-established consumer brand could participate meaningfully in the industry’s technological evolution rather than relying solely on traditional advertising approaches.
MAGGI’s performance suggested that heritage and innovation do not have to compete with each other. A familiar household brand can retain its cultural identity while experimenting with emerging technology.
Craft: Taste of Christmas Wins Gold for Film
MAGGI Taste of Christmas was another major contributor to the Brand of the Year result.
The campaign won Gold for Best Film, one of the traditional creative craft categories of the Gong Gong Awards.
The Gold demonstrated that while MAGGI was embracing newer technology through MAGGI Mami, it continued to perform strongly in one of advertising’s most established creative disciplines: storytelling through film.
This balance between new technology and established human craft also reflected the central proposition of the 2026 Festival.
Culture: Advertising That Goes Beyond Selling
Taste of Christmas also received Bronze for Cultural Impact.
This added another dimension to MAGGI’s performance.
For a food brand, culture represents fertile but demanding creative territory. Food is closely tied to family, celebration, identity, tradition and shared experience.
Recognition within Cultural Impact therefore showed that the campaign was being assessed not simply as product communication but as work capable of engaging with the wider cultural environment in which the brand exists.
The same campaign consequently succeeded both as creative craft and culturally relevant communication.
Integration: Esther and Tara
MAGGI’s Esther and Tara work secured Silver for Best Integrated Campaign.
This was another important part of the Brand of the Year case.
Integrated Campaign evaluates a different capability from film craft or technology. It examines the ability to take an idea and build it coherently across channels and consumer touchpoints.
MAGGI therefore demonstrated that its creative performance was not dependent on one outstanding execution.
The brand was able to produce recognised work at both the individual-execution level and at the wider integrated-campaign level.
Media: Taste of Christmas Adds Another Dimension
MAGGI Taste of Christmas also received Bronze for Excellence in Media Strategy.
The Media award further expanded the range of disciplines in which the brand achieved recognition.
It is particularly notable because the 2026 Media competition proved difficult, with only Bronze metals ultimately emerging from the Media sub-categories.
MAGGI’s ability to secure one of those Media recognitions strengthened an already broad awards performance.
One Brand, Several Creative Expressions
The overall MAGGI story was therefore not based on a single campaign winning repeatedly in closely related categories.
Three identifiable pieces of work contributed to its five awards:
MAGGI Taste of Christmas
MAGGI Mami
MAGGI Esther and Tara
And before the final metal allocation, MAGGI-related work had appeared broadly across the Gong Gong shortlist, including MAGGI Creator Conference 2.0, MAGGI Piment Ail, MAGGI Mami, MAGGI Taste of Christmas, Tara & Esther and MAGGI Double Chop Promo, across disciplines ranging from creators and social media to media strategy, cultural impact, digital and outdoor.
That depth of participation helps explain why MAGGI’s final performance was more than an isolated awards-night success.
It reflected a broader body of creative activity.
A Strong Race for Brand of the Year
MAGGI did not win in a weak competitive field.
Several brands produced notable performances during the 18th Gong Gong Awards.
The final brand ranking recorded:
| Brand | Gold | Silver | Bronze | Total |
| MAGGI | 2 | 1 | 2 | 5 |
| MoMo | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Nescafé | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Absa | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Tidal Rave | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Coke | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| MTN | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
The comparison makes MAGGI’s advantage clear.
MoMo: A Strong Integrated Performance
MoMo was one of the closest competitors, winning three medals.
MoMo Enfa Nfa hↄ won Gold for Best Integrated Campaign, while MoMo Still Mensaka collected Silver for Campaign Effectiveness and Bronze for Best Integrated Campaign.
That represented a strong performance, particularly because it combined integrated creativity with effectiveness.
But MAGGI had a decisive advantage in volume and breadth: five awards across a much wider range of disciplines compared with MoMo’s three.
Nescafé: Quality Across Experience and Creators
Nescafé also produced an impressive result of one Gold, one Silver and one Bronze.
Nescafé Ramadan won Gold for Influencer & Creator Economy and Silver for Branded Experience & Activation, while it also picked up Bronze in Media through Best Media Idea/Innovation.
On metal quality, Nescafé’s 1 Gold, 1 Silver and 1 Bronze was identical to MoMo’s medal mix.
But both remained two awards behind MAGGI’s total of five.
There is also an interesting dimension to the Nescafé result: Nescafé and MAGGI are both Nestlé brands, but the Brand of the Year system did not consolidate parent companies. Each brand was assessed separately.
MAGGI therefore did not become Brand of the Year because other Nestlé brands’ awards were added to its tally. It won on the strength of MAGGI’s own five awards.
Indeed, Nestlé Ghana’s wider showing was noteworthy in its own right: Nescafé won three awards and MILO secured Gold for Gong Gong for Good, in addition to MAGGI’s five.
That broader performance suggests a strong creative culture across the company’s brand portfolio, even though it did not form part of the mathematical calculation that made MAGGI Brand of the Year.
Absa: Consistency Without the Higher Metals
Absa also recorded three awards, all Bronze.
Its recognised work included the Absa SME Loans Campaign, Acquisition Campaign 2025 — Get More with Absa, and Get More From Absa.
The three awards showed consistency, but MAGGI’s advantage was substantial: it had more total awards and, importantly, two of its five recognitions were Gold.
Tidal Rave, Coke and MTN Also Made Their Mark
Tidal Rave recorded a Gold and a Bronze, including Gold for Tidal Rave Festival 2025 in Branded Experience & Activation.
Coke secured two Silver awards through Share A Coke, while MTN recorded Silver for MTN Mancomm Event and Bronze for MTN Mancomm.
All demonstrated strong creative performances, but none achieved the combination of five total awards, two Golds and recognition across five different disciplines that characterised MAGGI’s year.
The Real Significance of MAGGI’s Win
MAGGI’s Brand of the Year title illustrates precisely why AAG and the Gong Gong Awards Board created the award.
A great advertising industry requires more than great advertising agencies.
It requires brands willing to believe in creativity.
It requires marketing teams prepared to work collaboratively with their agencies, allow ideas to develop, embrace new technologies, understand culture and invest consistently in brand building.
MAGGI’s 2026 results provide evidence of that kind of breadth.
The brand was recognised for film craft.
It was recognised for integrated communication.
It was recognised for cultural impact.
It was recognised for media strategy.
And in a year when the entire Gong Gong Festival was examining the relationship between artificial intelligence and human creativity, it won Gold for Best Use of AI & Creative Tech.
That combination made the Brand of the Year decision compelling.
There were brands that produced outstanding individual campaigns. There were brands that won Gold. There were brands that demonstrated innovation, effectiveness or cultural relevance.
MAGGI’s distinction was that it demonstrated several of these qualities at the same time and across several pieces of work.
The result was five metals:
2 Gold. 1 Silver. 2 Bronze.
More than any other individual brand in the 2026 competition.
Celebrating the Client Behind the Creativity
The Brand of the Year award also places appropriate attention on the relationship behind the work.
MAGGI’s five winning entries were associated with Publicis West Africa, which itself emerged as the leading agency in the updated Gong Gong medal table with five Gold, two Silver and five Bronze awards.
That intersection is significant.
A strong agency performance and a strong client performance occurring simultaneously illustrates the principle AAG seeks to encourage: the best advertising emerges when ambitious brands and strong agencies work as genuine creative partners.
The Brand of the Year recognition therefore belongs not simply to a logo or product.
It acknowledges the marketers and brand custodians at Nestlé Ghana behind MAGGI, together with their agency partners, who created, approved and delivered a body of work capable of succeeding before different juries across different advertising disciplines.
That is the behaviour the Gong Gong Brand of the Year award seeks to encourage across corporate Ghana.
Because when clients demand better thinking, support original ideas and treat creativity as an investment rather than simply an advertising cost, agencies are able to produce better work.
Better work builds stronger brands.
And stronger brands ultimately strengthen Ghana’s entire advertising industry.
For 2026, MAGGI stood out as the clearest example of that principle — and earned its place as the 18th Gong Gong Awards Brand of the Year.