AME's award-winning jury panel includes some of the world’s most creative and strategic minds in advertising, marketing communications, and brand building from around the globe. As some of the industry's foremost strategy leaders, they bring a wealth of experience and sharp perspectives to the jury panel. Their years of industry experience provides them with an understanding of the partnership between creativity and effectiveness and ensures that the most creative and effective work will be recognized and awarded.
2025 AME Grand Jury member, Margaux Pepper brings a contagious enthusiasm, insatiable curiosity, and passion for all things delicious to her work turning brands into cultural relevance powerhouses. In her decade at Weber Shandwick she's worked across all corners of the food and beverage industry, from commodities (Pork, Milk, Pecans) to retail (ALDI) to foodservice (Panera, McDonald’s) and CPG (Nestlé, Bud Light, Jameson).
Margaux's strategic prowess was behind moments like Olympian Katie Ledecky swimming across a pool balancing chocolate milk on her head for the Milk Board, the drool-worthy, tradition-busting Digiorno Thanksgiving Pizza, and the revival of discontinued Italian icon pastina with fellow Italian stars S.Pellegrino and Stanley Tucci.
Her work has been globally recognized by some of the world's most prestigious competitions, from Effies to Sabres to ADDYs, and she's served as a jurist for the PR Week Awards and Effie Collegiate competition. She will always be especially proud of her victory as a U.S winner and Global top five finalist in the 2015 Cannes Young Lions PR competition.
In the interview below Margaux shares her insights on how brands are leveraging short-form videos and user generated content to attract younger viewers, the impact of data analytics and AI, her definition of standout effective advertising and more.
AME Awards: From your perspective as a creative strategist, what standout qualities define award-winning, effective advertising today?
Margaux Pepper: Ads that don’t feel like ads. When you uncover something a person actually wants and your brand can provide that value, that’s what gets people to pay attention and take action.
AME Awards: Why are effectiveness competitions like the AME Awards essential for measuring impact and industry growth?
Margaux Pepper: For me, one of the most exciting parts of creating something, whether it’s art or a meal or advertising, is seeing how people respond to it. Effectiveness competitions matter because we don’t create advertising in a vacuum – we create it to impact people and influence behavior.
AME Awards: How have advancements in data analytics and AI influenced the development and success of advertising strategies?
Margaux Pepper: While it may seem counterintuitive, I think data analytics and AI have helped advertisers better understand the human beings they’re targeting. It can be hard to visualize a person – their interests, their motivations, the media they consume – if all you have is a broad demographic like “Millennial moms” or “Gen Z boys”. One of my favorite tools in our Weber Shandwick toolbox is called Culture Compass, which uses AI to identify which topics, partners, flavors and beyond are most likely to resonate with a specific audience, based on a massive data set of consumer conversations. That analysis provides the spark for ideas that are not only creative and fun, but ultimately more effective.
AME Awards: How are brands leveraging short-form video and user-generated content to connect with younger audiences? Are there any standout examples of success?
Margaux Pepper: The brands that do content best treat it as a two-way dialogue, not a broadcast. They recognize the power of the boundless creativity of everyday people, and follow their lead, or add fuel to their fire. One of my favorite examples is how, instead of trying to create and spread a viral TikTok dance for her brat album, Charli XCX joined in on the “apple dance” created by fan Kelley Heyer, catapulting it from a trend with around 2,000 videos to one with nearly 400,000 fans in on the fun. Charli even took it a step further during her Sweat tour by inviting Kelley and other Apple Girl icons to perform the dance on the big screen from the crowd, compounding the possibilities for co-creation, participation, and sharing.