Wonderhood Studios 2025: Originality With A Cultural Punch

Wonderhood Studios has had a watershed year, further growing its reputation as a creative force for brands to turn to while producing stand out work for clients such as Coral, Waitrose, INEOS, the V&A, and Three UK.

In particular its Christmas campaign for Waitrose blew rival supermarkets out of the water and is an obvious contender for gongs next year (more on that later).

We asked CEO Alex Best to discuss the agency's achievements.

Alex Best, CEO, on Wonderhood Studios' 2025

What three words would you use to describe 2025?

Hitting our stride.

Talk us through some of your agency’s highlights this year

Benedict Cumberbatch kept audiences glued to their seats for National Theatre Live.

We captured the spirit of the V&A for current and future employees and gave Soho Radio a new identity that felt as alive as the station itself.

We invited the nation to let their summer side out and drove the point home by skewering a Camden building with a giant kebab.

We brought some much-needed grit to the polished world of automotive with the INEOS Grenadier.

We proved ethics don’t have to be boring with Waitrose’s Better Chicken Commitment.

And used AI to build a billboard that showed, in real time, how skin burns in the sun, a small moment of tech doing something human.

We united Three and Vodafone under one simple truth: two networks really are better than one.

We kept remixing culture with another Waitrose No.1 anthem.

And we ended the year reminding Britain that food is the language of love, with a Christmas campaign that captured hearts and headlines.

Our focus never really changes.

We make ideas people choose to watch, not skip.

Because if you can earn attention, you can earn everything else, fame, loyalty, results.

2025 was the year that belief went from philosophy to proof.

What one thing are you proudest of this year?

Waitrose’s Christmas campaign.

The Waitrose Christmas 2025 campaign transforms the supermarket’s festive advertising into a love letter to food. Built around the idea that, for food lovers, the ultimate gift isn’t something you buy, it’s something you cook.

Rather than a traditional ad, Waitrose has released a four-minute Christmas rom-com, romantic, funny, and full of delicious food that invites the nation to say it with food this festive season. Supported by a blockbuster-style launch, a world-first ITV broadcast, and activations across stores, social, and Dish, it’s more than a campaign; it’s a celebration of why food is the most powerful gift of all.

And what’s been your biggest challenge?

The same campaign [Waitrose], no surprise there. It was a monster of a project, full of moving parts, high expectations, and even higher standards. We learned a lot about how we work when the pressure’s on. How to collaborate faster. How to protect the fun in the process even when the stakes are enormous.

It stretched us in all the right ways.

What are you most looking forward to in 2026?

Putting those lessons to work. We’ve brought our advertising, TV, and social teams closer together than ever around one goal: to captivate audiences. That blend of storytelling and audience insight is what gives Wonderhood its edge.

In 2026, we’ll take that way of working into new categories, new clients, and new cultural spaces and see how far we can push it.

And what one change would you most like to see in our industry next year?

We’ve reached peak efficiency. Every brand has the same dashboards, the same metrics, the same optimised media plans. And yet, attention is at an all-time low. The next competitive advantage isn’t efficiency, it’s captivation. Because once everyone’s efficient, efficiency stops being a differentiator. What separates winners now is who can truly hold people — not just find them.

Efficiency helps you reach people. Captivation makes them stay.

And in a world where people can skip, scroll, and swipe you out of existence, the brands that win will be the ones that can’t be ignored.

The smartest brands won’t choose between efficiency and creativity.

They’ll make efficiency work in the service of creativity, using data to fuel imagination, not replace it. Because what drives growth now isn’t just visibility. It’s captivation.

Creative Salon on Wonderhood Studios 2025

Throughout the year has been steadily hiring and promoting talent, including various internal promotions such as that of Nick Exford, formerly head of planning, to become its first executive strategy director reporting into the now departing chief strategy officer and co-founder Jess Lovell. At the same time, Joe Harris became head of strategy, having contributed to the growth of Three and Ineos Grenadier, while also leading strategy for Wonderhood Design. 

Meanwhile, Georgia Bullen made the step up to become head of account management while Stacy Bird and Jack Croft were appointed executive creative directors, reporting to CCO and co-founder Aidan McClure. James Rafter, Myles Vincent, Jen Ashton and Oli Short also took on expanded creative director roles. 

External hires have included Holly Nash and Alysha Radia from BBC Creative, Sophie Crean from We Are Social and Coel James and Chiara Piccirillo becoming junior creatives following a creative placement at the agency. 

“When times get tough, the industry often hides behind efficiency and lowest-common-denominator thinking. We’ve done the opposite. We’ve bet on originality and cultural punch,” adds Best. 

The work produced for supermarket retailer Waitrose has quickly become a calling card for Wonderhood. Having initially developed a whodunnit-style ad featuring Line of Duty’s Martin Compston and Vicky McClure as an online addition to the brand’s Christmas campaign last year, it was elevated to handling the entirety of Waitrose’s creative output. 

Projects across the year really underlined the entertainment credentials of Wonderhood’s team, such as an Easter activation featuring comedian Mo Gillighan and a giant green rabbit surprising passers by, while Chesney Hawkes was drafted in for a social-first campaign to reimagine his classic hit 'The One and Only’ to promote the premium range.

The ‘Check Your Chicken’ work saw The Horne Section, featuring Taskmaster creator Alex Horne, lead a comedic social video to underline the Better Chicken Commitment's higher animal welfare standards, while the agency also utilised OOH to eye catching effect, with a giant kebab leading the summer campaign.  

That work all came to a head at the end of the year in glorious fashion with the reveal of the Christmas work, ‘The Perfect Gift’, featuring the surprising pairing of Keira Knightley and Joe Wilkinson. The four-minute mini-movie highlighted the importance and ease of “saying it with food”, supported by 60 and 30-second films designed as ‘movie trailers’ to generate excitement and intrigue around the main event. 

Telecommunications network Three also rolled out various activations, one featuring former England star Peter Crouch for a campaign encouraging football fans to talk more about their mental health and another - ‘Glow’ - that championed the everyday wins that come with being a Three customer. 

For Coral, a content series with social media star and football fan 'Big John' was released, featuring the TikTok star visiting a selection of the UK’s best motorway services and then giving his recommendations in a series of short videos for away-day fans. 

Another film, made for The King’s Trust, encouraged the public to invest in young people around the world to help fulfil their potential and help solve the global crisis in youth unemployment. And its gift for marrying innovation and creativity was evident when for British Skin Foundation, Wonderhood produced the world’s first multiple-location DOOH campaign ‘The Burnable Billboard’. It used images controlled by live data feed technology, and API and data from weather sensors, to reflect the effects of too much sun exposure as it happened. 

The design team worked with the V&A to produce a visual identity, while challenger brand INEOS enlisted Wonderhood to create the provocative ‘Us Vs. Them’’ billboards which appeared near rival Land Rover sales locations. 

And it has won silverware at the Campaign Big Awards in the Best Idea from an Agency Initiative category with 'Homeless Delivery' for Soup Kitchen London x Just Eat.

The winter initiative used the Just Eat app to fund a meal for someone facing homelessness.

Creative Salon says...

This has been an outstanding year for Wonderhood Studios across the board, having shown it can keep up and outplay its more traditional agency competitors - networks and independents. Its experience in developing entertainment content aligns with advertisers' direction, as they look to produce multiple elements under one campaign platform to play across various platforms using natively produced content. The agency also provided this year's Christmas hit for Waitrose. There's no denying that this is a creative business on the up.