About the Awards

The Channel 4 Diversity In Advertising Award offers an annual £1 million airtime prize for a brand who best responds to our creative brief which in previous years has been about encouraging greater representation of diverse communities in advertising and in 2025 the brief is encouraging brands to be more inclusive in their design of their own ads.

The award is an established industry scheme and has encouraged greater and more authentic representation of diverse UK communities through mainstream UK television advertising.

The brands and agencies who have entered the Diversity in Advertising awards over the years have not only seen brilliant success with their own campaigns, but these winning ads have gone on to win some of the most prestigious awards in our industry, driving fame for the brand itself. These have included Gold Lions at the Cannes Festival of Creativity and Haymarket’s ‘Campaign of the Decade’. Not only is creating an ad for the DIA the right thing to do for all of your audience but its winning success goes way beyond brand recognition or sales increases. It drives industry-wide fame.

The importance of doing this is two-fold;

Research shows that diverse communities feel like they aren’t accurately or sufficiently represented on screen in UK advertising.

Omitting diverse communities from advertising means that non-diverse communities are not exposed to a true reflection of the multicultural society we live in.
And with 2025’s brief, we’re not just aiming for representation, we’re aiming to reach audiences that brands have previously excluded.

Since 2016, Channel 4 has sought to encourage the UK advertising community to be more inclusive in their campaigns by awarding an annual £1million airtime prize. The prize is awarded to the brand who best responds to our revolving brief to create an advertisement which promotes their product/service in a manner which authentically delivers on the brief objectives.

Whilst the winning brand receives a £1million advertising campaign for their commercial, Channel 4 also offers to match-fund (up to £250k limit each) the other shortlisted entries – with the motivation being to get as many representative campaigns on air as possible.

The overall ambition of the award is to get more representative advertising campaigns on air and encourage greater inclusive thinking within the creative process behind the campaigns.

For further information, or if you have any questions or queries, please email us at 4sales@channel4.co.uk