Icelandair ‘The Real Unreal’ Named No. 1 Campaign in the World at Global SABRE Awards

Icelandair’s The Real Unreal has been named the top campaign in the world at PRovoke Media’s 2026 Global SABRE Awards Top 40 Campaigns of the Year.

The Global SABRE winners were selected from more than 5,500 entries submitted from over 60 countries. The awards were presented at the PRovoke Global Summit held in Chicago on October 26. Earlier this year, the campaign was awarded best Travel and Tourism Campaign at the Shorty Awards and took home Platinum at PRovoke’s own EMEA Awards.

Created by Icelandair in partnership with FleishmanHillard and Icelandic affiliate agency Hvíta húsið, The Real Unreal challenged the growing influence of AI-generated images in travel and tourism. It responded to social media speculation that Iceland “wasn’t real,” as people increasingly questioned whether striking photographs of the country’s distinctive landscapes were genuine.

Icelandair’s campaign was built around a promise of authenticity. It included a manifesto, an open letter to AI developers (below) and activity across earned, social and paid media. The work positioned the airline as a champion of unfiltered, undoctored imagery and travel experiences.

The campaign connected a concern about Iceland’s portrayal online to a broader debate about trust in digital content. As AI-generated imagery becomes more prevalent, The Real Unreal made authenticity the focus and invited audiences to reconsider what they see in travel imagery.

Earlier this year, Phillippa Solway, FleishmanHillard’s head of travel and tourism, consumer and brand marketing and Gísli Brynjólfsson, Icelandair’s director of global marketing, joined PRovoke’s Paul Holmes to discuss the campaign, which also took top honors at the EMEA region SABRE Awards.

Solway said: “I think I think the beauty of this campaign is that it starts from a human truth, which is where the strongest and best work really comes from and why it’s resonated with so many people. It started with an insight that we gathered from focus groups that people thought Iceland was too good to be true … We thought, well, how do we flip this and embrace it and decide to make a stand for real, authentic experiences and travel.”

Solway said the campaign stood in contrast to activity across the travel sector, where influencers were using AI tools to “enhance” or even create beautiful images. She said this was “turning into a bigger issue for people not really understanding a country like Iceland, the real beauty of it.”