Runway published the winners of the second Big Ad Contest, picking fifteen spots out of thousands of entries. The setup: seven fictional briefs — Vero Blood Orange Soda, Solacé Sunscreen, the Eureka Waterproof Notepad, the JAUNT portable speaker, Understory Mushroom Powder, the JACK Multi-Tool, and an open brief to invent your own product — each with a product image, a logo, and a one-line insight to answer. Entrants had July to make a 15-to-30-second spot entirely inside Runway, watermark visible, posted publicly with the contest hashtag. The jury scored on concept, craft, emotional impact, and adherence to brief, and the ladder ran $50,000 for first, $15,000 for second, $10,000 for third, $5,000 each for fourth and fifth, and $1,000 apiece for the ten honorable mentions. The spec ad is a shrewd format for this moment. It's the shortest professional unit in film, it has a brief to judge against so taste can be scored rather than argued, and it's the exact work AI video is closest to taking over commercially — which makes a contest like this less a showcase than an audition reel aimed at agencies. Ciro Kavouras took first with "This is not Norway." What the shortlist quietly shows is how much the brief shapes the field: Solacé Sunscreen accounts for five of the ten honorable mentions and JAUNT for three, so half the runners-up were solving the same two problems as each other. This is Runway's third open-call prize of 2026, after Volume I of the ad contest and the Big Pitch Contest in May, each with a $100,000 pool. The annual festival cadence AIFF established has become something closer to a standing bounty program.