I Built the Gong Gong Awards Archive I Was Complaining About

*Huge disclaimer: This was written with AI with minor edits (italicized) sprinkled in for dramatic effect. Muhahahahaha!

A day ago, I wrote about how unnecessarily difficult it was to explore past Gong Gong Awards winners.

The official trail involved PDFs, a long photo gallery, scattered links and what was essentially a spreadsheet of the final awards.

A bloody spreadsheet!

I was annoyed enough to spin up Claude Code and Codex to see what a better archive could look like. At the time, it was still an experiment. Something I might pitch to the Advertising Association of Ghana.

Or not.

Anywho, I did the thing.

The Ghana Creative Index is now live. Do I like the name? Nope. But I'll let it run for now.

What began as an attempt to make the Gong Gong Awards less painful to explore has become a proper interactive archive of Ghanaian advertising and creative work.

There are currently 179 sourced award records across seven editions. You can move between award years, search the work, filter by medal, agency, client or channel, and sort the results without opening sixteen tabs and sacrificing your afternoon to Google.

Where campaign videos are available, you can watch them directly on the site.

You can also open agency records, see the work behind their medal totals, explore the brands behind the winning campaigns, save work to a personal shortlist and export the underlying records as a CSV.

Basically, all the things I expected an awards archive to let me do in the first place.

The archive became an index

While building it, I realised the problem was bigger than the Gong Gong Awards website.

Ghana's marketing industry produces campaigns, case studies, awards and creative talent every year, but very little of that history remains easily accessible after the ceremony, the LinkedIn posts and the congratulatory graphics have passed.

An awards night gives the work a moment.

An archive gives it a life.

So the project expanded into the Ghana Creative Index, with the Gong Gong Awards becoming its first collection.

The larger idea is to eventually connect records from other institutions recognising Ghanaian marketing, advertising and public-relations work, including the CIMG Marketing Performance Awards and the Institute of Public Relations Ghana Excellence Awards. Those collections are not connected yet, but the structure now exists for them.

This means the project can eventually become more than a prettier winners list.

To be honest, this actually started as the Ghana Agency Index to list out all the marketing & comms agencies and institutions in the country. I've been on that for a week and then some now, and have burned through my tokens and usage limits. But it's coming soon I promise. I'll just leave a small YT video for you to check out somewhere in this post.

It could help us understand which agencies are consistently winning (or submitting to awards), which brands are investing in recognised work, where the strongest creative disciplines are emerging and how the shape of Ghana's industry changes over time.

Not as a final verdict on who is brilliant and who is not. Awards are far too complicated, political and occasionally sus for that.

Think of it as a signal.

One signal among several.

Building with messy receipts

The less glamorous part of this project was the data.

The index retains the edition, category, campaign, client, agency, medal, channel, available media and original source attached to each record. Known variations in agency names and capitalisation have been cleaned to make the archive easier to search, without quietly rewriting the original records.

That sounds very neat when written in one paragraph.

It was not neat. Even working with AI, it was hectic. Even though I wrote about this just yesterday, I've been working on it all weekend.

Some records were detailed. Others were bare. Some included campaign videos. Others merely confirmed that an award had been handed out. Names changed. Categories changed. Formatting changed.

I have tried to keep the gaps visible rather than fill them with confident nonsense.

The numbers on the site describe what has currently been sourced and ingested. They are not an objective ranking of creative quality, agency size or industry importance.

This is also still an independent prototype, not an official Advertising Association of Ghana platform. The award records remain credited to the AAG and the publishers from which they were sourced.

Ghana made the work. Let us actually see it.

I built this because Ghana's creative industry deserves more than annual amnesia.

Students should be able to study the work.

Agencies should be able to point people towards what they made.

Brands should be able to see the creative history they helped fund.

I should be able to cuss and raise my fists in pure chaotic anger, while beating myself up because I knew I could have thought of that, or honestly, to just take inspiration or compare coat sizes.

And the rest of us should be able to argue about the industry with actual receipts.

There is still plenty to add, fix and rethink. Some interactions need tightening. More campaign media needs to be found. More award years and collections need to be connected.

But the thing exists now.

You can explore the winners, strike the trophy, watch the campaigns and build your own shortlist.

Will I still pitch it to the AAG?

Maybe.

I said “or not” in the last article, and I intend to maintain the suspense.

Cue evil laugh.