McCann New York’s Fearless Girl Statue, BBDO New York’s Super Bowl campaign for Tide and the Palau Pledge were the big winners at D&AD Awards last night, receiving the top accolade of a black pencil.

Fearless Girl – a statue created for State Street Global Advisors to mark International Women’s Day – won 13 pencils including a black and seven yellows. Palau Pledge – a campaign that asked visitors to Palau to sign an agreement in their passports promising not to damage the island’s resources – won eight, while ‘It’s a Tide Ad’ (a clever series of films that initially appeared to be for other brands or products, which aired during each quarter of this year’s Super Bowl) won five.

JKR was the most successful design agency, winning five pencils, followed by the New York Times and the Guardian.

BBDO New York was awarded 26 pencils – more than any other ad agency – followed by McCann New York and AMVBBDO.

State Street Global Advisors was the most awarded client, followed by Burger King and Apple.

Other successful projects included Spike Jonez’s ‘Welcome Home’ ad for Apple, starring FKA twigs, which received six pencils:

Wieden + Kennedy’s ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ spot for Nike, which won eight, and David Miami’s ‘Google Home of the Whopper’ campaign (a TV ad that prompted Google Home devices to read out the Wikipedia entry on the Burger King whopper), which won ten.

BBDO’s powerful film The Talk – an ad for P&G in which black mothers discussed racism with their children – won seven pencils:

While KFC’s response to its supply chain crisis and LadBible’s Trash Isles project were the most successful campaigns in the PR category, both winning yellow pencils.

Solab Pictures’ interactive music video for Naive New Beaters track Words Hurt received the only yellow pencil in the music video category: viewers were invited to watch a series of videos and make decisions – for example, choosing whether to cheat on a test – to unlock other films and win prizes. (Try it out for yourself here.)

Yellow-pencil winning poster designs included Japanese agency Dentsu’s ‘eating kabuki with your fingers’ for Shochiku Minami-za and Open Your Eyes – a photographic poster created by Grey Germany to raise awareness of FGM in the country.

Dentsu also won yellow pencils for its genius packaging design for toilet roll brand Matsumotokiyoshi Holdings – the packaging is designed to ease consumers’ embarrassment at buying toilet roll and uses photographs of a baby, a boombox and a bare torso to conceal the product – and its ‘Sumo Girls’ print ads for newspaper publisher Hokkoku Shimbun, Inc. The campaign was launched to promote the Kanazawa High School Sumo Wrestling Tournament and features images of a female sumo team performing sumo twists, drops and throws.

The Spatial Design jury awarded two yellow pencils: one for London Mithraeum – a Bloomberg exhibition exploring Roman life in London designed by Local Projects – and another for Wayne McGregor’s show autobiography, designed by Ben Cullen Williams.

Google was the only company to receive yellow pencils in the Product Design category. It received one for the Pixel Buds – a pair of bluetooth earphones for the Pixel 2 smartphone – and another for touchscreen synthesiser the NSynth Super.

Ogilvy’s dissolving soldier – created for Visit Flanders to mark the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele – was the only project other than Fearless Girl to win a yellow pencil in the outdoor category. The statue was placed in London and created using mud from Flanders Fields. It slowly dissolved as it was exposed to rain – a poignant reminder of the atrocious weather conditions that soldiers endured during battle. (More on the project here.)

One of the biggest winners in the branding category this year was We Are Unlimited’s social stunt for McDonald’s, which saw the brand flip its yellow ‘M’ upside down to resemble a ‘w’ to mark International Women’s Day. The project was awarded three yellow pencils.

There were no yellow pencils awarded in either the Book Deisgn or Writing for Design categories this year, but the Guardian, the New York Times and Italian newspaper La Repubblica – which recently redesigned its print and online editions – received yellow pencils for editorial design. (Read our feature on the Guardian’s comprehensive redesign here.)

In the branding category, JKR received a yellow pencil for its moving image work for The Gut Stuff (below), but there was a notable lack of yellow pencils awarded to identity projects – excluding campaign identities for McDonald’s and the Palau Project.

The Creativity for Good jury awarded just two yellow pencils: one to Fearless Girl and another to Ash to Art, a project conceived by JWT to raise money for repairs to Glasgow School of Art following a fire in the building.

You can see the full list of winners at dandad.org