Accenture Song South Africa has been named Best Digital Agency at the 2026 IAB Bookmark Awards, sharing the top honour with Ogilvy.
It is the latest recognition in a strong year for the agency, which has seen its work recognised at Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, The Webby Awards, Tribeca X, the Clio Awards and the Smarties.
The agency picked up 21 awards and special honours at this year’s Bookmarks across Build, Communicate, Connect, Innovate, Impact and Craft. It also received the Digital Rising Star honour for Gregory Leigh Booysen and Pixel for Purpose for its work with the Philipstown WireCar Foundation. And in a moving moment for the team, former Accenture Song South Africa CEO Haydn Townsend, was recognised posthumously with the Outstanding Individual Impact award.
The Philipstown WireCar Grand Prix was the biggest contributor to the night’s haul, winning Gold across a range of categories including Games, Integrated Digital Campaign, Interactive Mixed Media, Digital Campaign Strategy, Best Use of Data in a Campaign, Online Video/Moving Image, Interactive Design and Excellence in Craft: Innovative Use of Technology.
The campaign has had a similarly strong run internationally. At Cannes Lions, it received a Silver Lion and Bronze Lion, following three Gold Pencils, two Silver Pencils and two Bronze Pencils at The One Show. It has also received recognition from The Webby Awards, Tribeca X and the Clio Awards.
Created for the Philipstown WireCar Foundation, the work took a handmade wire-car race from a small Karoo town and turned it into a documentary, mobile game and e-commerce platform. It is one of several pieces of Accenture Song work that have travelled well beyond South Africa this year. Allan Gray’s A Seat at the Table received a D&AD Wood Pencil in Spatial Design, making it the only South African work to receive a Pencil at the 2026 awards. The project used spatial design, research, writing, photography and binaural audio to tell the stories of pioneering South African women.
For Accenture Song, the common thread across the work is the combination of creative thinking, technology, data and design around a particular challenge, rather than starting with a particular format or channel.
“Being named Best Digital Agency is a meaningful recognition of how the agency has evolved and of the breadth of work our teams are doing,” says Tseliso Rangaka, chief creative officer at Accenture Song South Africa. “The work recognised at the Bookmarks spans strategy, creativity, technology, data, experience and craft. Those disciplines are increasingly connected, and that gives us the opportunity to approach client challenges in very different ways.”
Rangaka says the awards are also a reflection of strong partnerships with clients. “Good work is rarely about one discipline or one team. It comes from bringing different perspectives together around a problem and being prepared to rethink the obvious answer. That’s what we’ve tried to do this year, and it’s great to see that work recognised locally as well as internationally.”
“There’s a lot here that deserves to be seen and heard. When you take something genuinely local and give it the right creative treatment, it doesn’t have to become less South African to travel. In fact, that can be the thing that makes it interesting.”
As creativity and technology continue to converge, the possibilities for the work are expanding. For Accenture Song, the next chapter is about using that convergence to continue to create work that is useful, relevant and built to make a difference.
