Judging 2026
GenNext is scored the way a good creative department argues about work: not by taste alone, and not by who already has a showreel. Every 2026 brief publishes the same five lenses in advance. After each round the chair returns a critique. Mystery is not a credential.
The rubric
Each lens is scored 1–10. The round total is the sum. A spectacular picture that cannot be made, or a clever line that does not meet the audience, cannot hide in an average. Band A and Band B use the same lenses; Band A is not "easier taste".
Insight is not a statistic copied from the brief. It is a specific observation about the audience, the place, or the tension that a stranger could recognise. Invented personas with no source score low. So does a "Gen Z wants authenticity" sentence that could be pasted onto any brief of the last ten years.
An idea is a decision you can say in a sentence and then make in more than one format. Decoration in search of a thought is not an idea. A slogan with no consequence is not an idea. If the work collapses when the fashionable reference is removed, the idea was the reference.
Typography, hierarchy, motion, drawing, editing, prototyping, spatial logic — judged in the terms of the category. We do not mark a title sequence as if it were a poster, or a product flow as if it were a campaign film. Unread type, broken contrast, uncleared music and un-declared generative fills are craft fails, not style.
The best student work is not polite. It is also not cruel. Cultural tension means the brief's social fact is visible in the piece: who is included, who is at risk, which cliché you refused. Shock without care scores low. So does work that could have been made for any country, any year, any body.
We are not asking you to have a production budget. We are asking whether the proposal respects physics, rights, safeguarding, printers, stallholders, and time. A library identity that a branch cannot reproduce, a film that uses a song you do not own, an onboarding that requires a clinical claim — these fail feasibility even if they look expensive.
The five lenses are equal. Finals week adds a live-pitch score for presence and interrogation, published in the Finals pack. We do not re-weight a round after we have seen who is ahead.
Each Production round is chaired by one working creative director and scored by a panel of at least three, drawn from graphics, motion, illustration, product, film or spatial practice as the brief requires. Panels rotate so that no single taste owns the season. Mentors from Foundations do not score the teams they advised in that round.
Submissions are anonymised at first pass: team names are stripped from the files the jury sees. Obvious self-identification in a film credit is allowed; stuffing a deck with school branding is not. After numeric scoring, the chair writes a short critique to every team that submitted a complete package. Incomplete packages (missing a required deliverable, late, or in the wrong spec) are marked as not scored, with a one-line reason.
Ties on the leaderboard are broken by the lowest variance across the five lenses, then by the craft score. We would rather promote a team that is solid everywhere than a team that is spectacular in one lens and absent in four. Finals selection takes the top six teams on cumulative Production scores, subject to the one-team-per-school rule. The live pitch in June 2026 is a new brief, not a recap of the season.
Jurors declare conflicts. A juror who has taught, employed, or family-related a team member sits out that team's score. We publish the round chairs after each round, not a celebrity poster of people who did not see the work.
Ethics
A student competition can extract labour, launder generated work, or put vulnerable audiences on a slide. These rules are how 2026 tries not to. They are also in the Terms.
Outside professionals may not draw, edit, code or voice the submission. Mentors advise. Parents and tutors may help with logistics and proofreading. If a jury member asks "why this type size" and only one person in the room can answer, that is a problem of authorship, not of nerves.
Image, text, code and video models may be used for research, blocking, texture or variation if named in the credits with a plain description of what they did. A submission whose primary artefact is an undeclared generated image, film or interface is disqualified. "In the style of a living artist" prompts are prohibited.
Photographing or filming identifiable people requires consent appropriate to their age. Mental-health, migration, poverty and identity briefs are not costumes. You may not invent medical advice. You may not use a classmate as a trauma prop.
Music, type, photography, trademarks and data sets must be original, licensed, or clearly public-domain / open-licensed. Uncleared commercial music is an automatic feasibility fail. 24G does not take ownership of your work; see Terms for the limited licence to exhibit and to issue certificates.
Bribing jurors, fabricating research interviews, submitting another team's files, or manipulating the verifier is expulsion from the season and, where relevant, certificate revocation. We would rather have five honest Finals teams than six.
You may put GenNext work in a portfolio with the year, category and result. You may not imply a job offer, a partnership with a named brand, or an affiliation with D&AD, ADC, Cannes Lions, The One Show, YCN or Adobe. Those programmes are described on The Field as landscape, not as ours.
The Award of Excellence is a season trophy, a certificate, and a public record. Category chips mark the team that led a discipline. Finalist certificates mark the six teams that reached the Forum. None of these is a professional licence. All of them are designed so that a stranger can type an ID and see that we meant it.
If you want the operational rules — teams, fees, AI, deadlines — they are in the FAQ. If you want the problems themselves, they are in the 2026 briefs.
The 2026 rubric is public before the first PDF drops. Registration closes 26 January.
Apply →