King of the Hill

One look at Chris Beresford-Hill’s CV and it’s clear why he’s well suited for the role of Entertainment Jury President.

There’s the role’s seniority – Beresford-Hill currently sits as Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at BBDO Worldwide – and the progress through landmark advertising agencies, including Modernista, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, TBWA\Chiat\Day New York and Ogilvy North America, and crowd-pleasing, brand-pleasing work for the likes of Foot Locker, Guinness, adidas and CeraVe.

Yet that’s ignoring the key component: the concept of entertainment. Before the jury rooms, network titles and culture-bothering campaigns, there were automotive brochures. So far, so basic.

But Beresford-Hill wanted even those brochures to be riveting.

If I learned how to write the automotive brochures, I dug into that so much that I wanted to make an automotive brochure that was a page turner.

“I think everything I’ve always done has always been incremental,” he explains. “If I learned how to write the automotive brochures, I dug into that so much that I wanted to make an automotive brochure that was a page turner. And when I did a good enough job with that, then I was allowed to write the radio ad.”

It was that progress – earn the radio ad, win with that, move to print, then eventually the big broadcast work – that led to the big roles, but the formative years were what made the journey possible.

Above: A cola-loving polar bear questions everything after choosing Pepsi Zero Sugar in BBDO’s Super Bowl spot, The Choice.

Repetition, repetition, repetition

Beresford-Hill’s first ‘real’ job was at Modernista in Boston, where the creative process was less about landing on the line quickly than exhausting every possible route into the brand.

“The nature of that agency was to write 250 headlines about the brand before anything happened, before the tagline was decided, before the campaign was architected,” he remembers. “It was to write and write and write against it.”

I always think the very best work has achieved what it has because it’s highly entertaining.

The aim, he says, was to find more ways to make the strategy and the product seem “novel, exciting, foreign, unique, mesmerising”. It was that regimented routine that disciplined him in copy, economy and the craft of making something ordinary feel special. A practice that opened up when he joined Goodby Silverstein and which led to irreverence, humour and range.

“I had sort of trained my brain to solve the brief through one tonality,” he says, “and really through a very structured, start-with-the-headlines-and-work-your-way-out process. Then, all of a sudden – like after training on a mountaintop with a monk for five years – someone gave me a giant set of colourful paints.”

Above: Tom Brady riffs on Deflategate in a film for Foot Locker’s fifth Week of Greatness.

Let me entertain you

If there’s one thing that marks out the biggest hits of Beresford-Hill’s credit list, it’s work that keeps on working once the media spend has done its bit. Campaigns that are just sticky enough to be sought out again.

“I always think the very best work has achieved what it has because it’s highly entertaining. And that might mean entertaining through provocation, or entertaining through capturing your imagination, or entertaining through tugging your heartstrings, or making you laugh uncontrollably. But that sort of memorability, and creating things that people want to revisit and seek out again and again, has always been true for the best work we do, and certainly the kind of work that I’ve always been most excited to participate in.”

We committed every campaign to scratching a sports culture itch.

An early example can be found in Foot Locker’s Approved campaign, created with Dan Lucey at BBDO. Launching in August 2012, the series started by presenting NBA stars as hilariously obsessive sneakerheads, exaggerating basketball culture’s growing crossover with fashion and hype culture. Built around deadpan performances and escalating absurdity, the work soon expanded to executions including Tom Brady riffing on Deflategate, Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield parodying their infamous, and ear-famous, rivalry, and Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr. leaning into the spectacle surrounding their long-awaited superfight.

“We had a client that wanted to go and find the edge,” says Beresford-Hill. “And so we committed every campaign to scratching a sports culture itch; whether that would be instigating the Manny Pacquiao / Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight, or making a joke that involves Mike Tyson returning part of Evander Holyfield’s ear.”

The work, and its extended run, proved that engagement was much more than just ‘click the thing’.

“We would get the athletes on board because, as we were building the campaign, we were building a case study that making fun of yourself and addressing the elephant in the room is ultimately highly rewarding,” he says. “Very early on, that was my first real taste of it, but it felt like we were driving that business by making the brand culturally relevant.”

Above: Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield appear in Foot Locker’s All Is Right, which imagines a world where everything is as it should be.

Petty larceny

The audacity of getting sportspeople to address topics comedically that they wouldn’t touch in another form is indicative of Beresford-Hill’s almost cheeky sense of ‘getting away with it’.

Describing the feeling as “like you’re a kid in a store and you’ve just stolen a Snickers bar”, the “petty larceny” at the heart of much of his most entertaining work is what gives the audience something to grab hold of.

“You’re really not going to do anything in this campaign that’s going to hurt anyone,” he says. “But boy, you’re going to get away with something. You’re going to turn a lawyer’s head. You’re going to make a marketer have to defend it. That’s always when you know you’re onto something.”

For Beresford-Hill, the best brand work often comes from putting something into the world that feels just dangerous enough to make people lean in.

People love it when a brand fucks up, but that’s not good for business.

“Brands are like people,” he says. “Brands are famous people. Everyone knows what Guinness is and what Geico is and what Foot Locker is. People love it when a brand fucks up, but that’s not good for business. But when a brand threads the needle and it goes right to an edge and kind of has a point of view on something, or expresses something that’s provocative, that’s when things get interesting.”

A more recent example is the award-winning Michael CeraVe campaign, one that Beresford-Hill modestly describes as just “a prank for the internet”.

Beginning with fake paparazzi sightings, awkward influencer encounters and conspiracy-fuelled social posts suggesting that actor Michael Cera had secretly founded CeraVe, the campaign deliberately blurred the line between internet joke and genuine rumour. The stunt culminated in a Super Bowl reveal that embraced the absurdity rather than puncturing it, turning a clinically positioned skincare brand into the centre of a weeks-long piece of participatory online comedy.

“We didn’t really try too hard to misdirect people,” he says, “but enough that people would have fun with it.”

Above: Manny Pacquiao mistakes talk of Foot Locker giving people what they want for news of a long-awaited Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight in It’s Happening.

Are you not entertained?

Despite clearly knowing it innately, Beresford-Hill admits he may not have had to define Entertainment so precisely until accepting the 2026 jury presidency. Now he has, and the definition is satisfyingly blunt: if it has to be argued as entertaining, it probably isn’t.

“The Entertainment Lions reward work that doesn’t feel like advertising. It’s work that competes with real entertainment. That would be shows on your watch list, podcasts you have queued up, things to do on your weekend calendar, something you would want to enjoy in your free time. Not necessarily you, but the intended audience.”

That distinction is important because, for Beresford-Hill, the category cannot simply reward an engaging ad campaign with a bit of entertainment value bolted on. It has to consider what the work was built to do, who it was built for, and whether it genuinely reached that audience in the right way.

The Entertainment Lions reward work that doesn’t feel like advertising.

“Effectiveness has to be taken relative to challenge,” he says. “If there’s a piece of entertainment that’s geared at 50 chief technology officers, then we can’t say that the amount of sales volume or the amount of views are the win. Whereas other times there’ll be a brand that’s trying to go more mass, and then the objective of creating exposure to the brand and the content will be [sales/views].”

That being said, the challenge attached to the broadness of content accepted in the category hasn’t escaped him. When asked how a podcast can be compared to a short film or a comic book, his answer is candid: “What you’ve mentioned lights up my nervous system in all the right ways, because we can’t get lost in the forest of all of this. It will be very important to look at category, subcategory and intended goal before we begin evaluating, and make sure that our jury is very dialled in to those things so that we don’t have too many sideways conversations.”