For the third year running, DEPT® is celebrating being named Network of the Year and Agency of the Year at The Webby Awards.
It’s been another impressive year of wins for DEPT® with 21 wins, 10 nominations, and 18 honorees for our work with brands including Gucci, Bang & Olufsen, Cowboy, and Virgin Galactic.
Setting new standards for the next era
The Webby Awards is the internet’s most respected symbol of success, attracting over 13,000 entries from 70 countries worldwide. With an esteemed jury and over two million votes cast by more than 600,000 people in the Webby People’s Voice, work by DEPT®, BASIC/DEPT®, HELLO MONDAY/DEPT® and DOGSTUDIO/DEPT® has been selected as the best in its category, reinforcing our position as a leading agency that’s setting the standard for tech and marketing.
“Winning Agency and Network of the Year for the third time straight was something I never even dreamed of when we started DEPT®,” says Dimi Albers, CEO of DEPT®. “I really want to give a big shoutout to our awesome clients, our hard working teams, the jury, and everyone who voted. Your support means everything to us. We’re pumped to keep pioneering tech and marketing, especially with our AI and impactful projects. Thanks so much, everyone!”
The winners
Bang & Olufsen: See yourself in sound
Hello Monday/DEPT®
Webby Winner & People’s Voice: Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics
People’s Voice: Best User Experience
For high-end consumer electronics brand, Bang & Olufsen, Hello Monday/DEPT® created a web app that gives every user a uniquely sensory experience. ‘See Yourself in Sound’ is designed to generate a vibrant, one-of-a-kind avatar for every visitor, crafted in real-time by analyzing your Spotify sound profile and aligning your overall mood and energy levels to all the aspects of a 3D character. After your 3D character is generated, it can be shared with the world via link or a video that’s created just for you.
Cowboy: Elevating a luxury ebike website to match its brand’s elegance
BASIC/DEPT®
Webby Winner: Best Visual Design – Function
The elevated digital brand experience we created for ebike pioneers, Cowboy, showcases its new ebikes as works of art designed to bring forth true freedom of movement. We crafted a gallery-like site that shows off the beauty of the bike and the intelligence of its design and function, ultimately inspiring site visitors to believe anywhere was possible with Cowboy.
Daniel’s Music Foundation: Raising the bar for accessible design
BASIC/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Accessible Technology
Daniel’s Music Foundation is a nonprofit empowering people with disabilities through music and Disability Awareness programs that has been changing lives in NYC for almost 20 years.
They needed a website that could keep up, so they came to us for a new one that would build trust, share joy, showcase impact, and also be accessible to people of all abilities. We raised the bar of excellence in accessible design; rather than modifying an experience for a few, it’s about finding ways to translate it for everyone to equally join the fun.
GiveAHand
HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Responsible AI
Following on from Hello Monday/DEPT®’s multi-award winning approach to teaching the American sign language alphabet, Fingerspelling, we launched GiveAHand.ai – the world’s largest open-source image library of hands fully tagged with data to help build better hand models.
One hundred percent crowdsourced, the data collected in the platform will generate a diverse dataset of hands, building an image library that will help unlock sign language. Researchers can then download and use these fully tagged images to improve their machine learning models, truly allowing the detection and translation of the full spectrum of Sign Language.
Google Store: Bringing the best of Google to people worldwide
BASIC/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Best Practices
Our collaboration with the Google Hardware team has helped turn store.google.com into a world-class brand and e-commerce destination.We’ve contributed end-to-end services, ranging from eCommerce strategy and experience design to art direction, content creation, and campaign development.
Google Jigsaw
HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®
Webby Winner: Corporate Social Responsibility
Jigsaw is a unit within Google that researches threats to open societies, and builds technology, products and tangible methods that inspire scalable solutions. Info Interventions is a collection of four of these experiments specifically created to help people build information resilience at critical moments in their online journey.
Together, our campaign reached 3.5M users of our target audience, while helping to drive efficient awareness and traffic to this important initiative.
Gucci – Ancora Fashion Show 2024
BASIC/DEPT®
Webby Winner: Best Mobile User Interface
People’s Voice: Best Mobile Visual Design – Function
In preparation for Milan Fashion Week, The House of Gucci trusted us to collaborate on bringing the digital world of Gucci Ancora to life. We created a digital platform that embodied Gucci Ancora’s premium visual language, while pushing innovation for delivering live content across 15 different languages. Our immersive experience meant that as soon as looks walked down the runway, they were quickly and seamlessly translated to the fullscreen experience of the site, meaning that guests all over the world could step into the show in real time.
Gucci
BASIC/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Best Visual Design – Function
We created a stunning branded commerce website for Gucci that encapsulates the luxury of this iconic brand.
Philips: One of a kind
DEPT®
People’s Voice: Best Community Engagement
The campaign we launched for the Philips OneBlade revolutionized customer engagement. Harnessing real, passionate user reviews, we transformed them into humorous, relatable films that playfully caricatured each review. This approach created a surreal yet human connection, sparking a cycle of new reviews and TikTok recreations. It proved to be a successful exercise in community engagement and creative storytelling.
Reddit: r/Place
DEPT®
People’s Voice: Arts, Culture & Lifestyle
We worked with Reddit to revive its 2017 experiment, r/Place, which saw users working together to create a digital art piece. With custom videos, time lapses, global leaderboards, and collaborations with Twitch streamers, the r/Place social content drove 218M organic impressions/views and during the week following r/Place), our social channels gained +270K followers and 56k mentions.
Jeff Koons Moonphase: Tailoring a celestial site for a lunar gallery
BASIC/DEPT®
People’s Voice: NetArt
People’s Voice: Best User Interface
We worked with Pace Gallery’s Web3 innovation hub, Pace Verso, to design and build a digital experience for iconic American artist Jeff Koons’ first-ever foray into the NFT space. Inspired by the moon, Koons created “Moon Phases” – a collection of sculptures and NFTs celebrating human achievement both past and present.
The project invites viewers to reflect on their place in space, with 125 sculptures inspired by influential historical figures sent—literally— to the moon via a partnership with SpaceX, while 125 corresponding replicas are available for purchase here on planet earth, each with their own NFT counterpart for art collectors to enjoy. We brought this out-of-this-world exhibit into the homes of people around the world, and easily communicated its highly complex concepts in ways that made it relatable to every visitor.
Sesame Workshop: Growing as we grieve
HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Health & Wellness
The Growing as we Grieve platform is a beautiful interactive experience for parents and caregivers to reflect on their own experience of grief and hear what has helped other families cope, thrive, and find joy.
Trainline: A rallying cry to use railways
DEPT®
People’s Voice: Sustainability & Environment
Trainline is Europe’s leading train and coach app. With a purpose for helping people make more environmentally friendly travel choices, the brand enlisted DEPT® to spread the word of its ‘I came by train’ campaign across paid social channels, inspiring people to help fight climate change and lower their carbon footprint by opting to travel by trains over cars and planes.
Undo the Firewall
HELLO MONDAY/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Responsible Innovation
Undo the Firewall is a grassroots initiative between The True Story and Hello Monday/DEPT® designed to counter internet censorship. By leveraging tech for good, we’ve created a straightforward solution to empower website owners globally to actively contribute to the fight against censorship and misinformation by hosting uncensored news stories to deliver the real stories.
DEPT® – Prepare to Pioneer
DOGSTUDIO/DEPT®
People’s Voice: Best Art Direction
‘Prepare to Pioneer’ is an AI-fueled wayfinder experience created by DOGSTUDIO/DEPT®, which encourages users to discover their Pioneering profile. Through a take on the well-known mechanics of fortune-telling, it takes users on a journey that offers a very unique twist on the traditional process of content curation, combining it with an innovative storytelling experience. Try it for yourself.
Virgin Galactic: Bringing users closer to space
DOGSTUDIO/DEPT®
Webby Winner & People’s Voice: Travel & Lifestyle
On a mission to accelerate the future of transportation and define the next generation of space travel, we worked with Virgin Galactic to launch its new commercial spaceflight website to connect all those who are curious about space travel. We created an immersive website experience to communicate the excitement of space travel that is truly out of this world…
In addition to the award wins, projects for the following clients were awarded as Nominees or Honorees: Design Within Reach; Doordash; eBay; GANNI; Just Eat; KFC; Louis Poulsen; Meebits; Patagonia; ReflexAI; Tempoo; Tony Blair Institute; Webex; Whoop.
Congratulations to our talented teams and pioneering clients for this incredible achievement, and thank you for voting!
Questions?
VP of Marketing, EMEA
