Winning trends from The Drum Awards for Marketing #2: transformative tech

After hosting the great and the good of the industry at live awards shows in London, New York and Singapore, it is clear from the winning work that key themes have repeatedly hit home with our judges regardless of where they are based.

The transformative power of tech is one such example, evident at every one of our awards shows. We take a look at some examples and catch up with the teams behind the work.

Inbox overhaul

Good Morning Accenture won the gong for Technology-led Innovation at our Americas show. Aiming to get a handle on the blizzard of emails, newsletters and invitations clogging up its employees’ inboxes every day and which often get in the way of actual work, the global IT consultancy went about transforming how its 730,000 team members communicate across the organization, using AI to determine the kinds of messages that are most important and creating a truly personal, mobile-friendly solution that delivers the information its people need in a single, daily communication.

Here’s what the team at Accenture had to say about the project and its award win.

Open-source obscenity censor

For the female-focused dating app Bumble meanwhile, which is on a mission to create a world where relationships are healthy and equitable, its new proprietary tools allow women to take control of their dating journeys. After helping to pass a bill in California effectively prohibiting cyberflashing, it released an open-source version of its private detector AI feature for other companies to use, with the image classifier helping them reduce cyberflashing on their platforms by automatically detecting and blurring lewd images. Ultimately, it worked in tandem with the wider tech community to make the internet a safer place while cementing its position as the most-trusted app among its competitors. It won in the Advertising and the Consumer Packaged Goods categories at our Americas show.

Here’s what the team at Bumble had to say about the project and its award win.

AI-enhanced outreach

In partnering with VidMob, a leading intelligent creative platform, the non-profit organization HIV Ireland, which focuses on supporting people living with HIV, was able to analyze and optimize its campaign video content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, expanding its outreach to increase awareness of its support services. Leveraging VidMob’s creative analytics tool, which was provided pro-bono, it employed AI and machine learning to measure the performance of details such as logos, copy, text treatment, colors, objects, people, emotions and facial expressions. This then allowed it to maximize each creative element of campaign video content, which as a result saw a 139% increase in people living with HIV participating in its peer support program. It won in the Public Sector category.

Here’s what the team at VidMob and HIV Ireland had to say about the project and the award win.

Read more about all the work that has won at The Drum Awards so far this year over on our case studies hub, and head to The Drum TV to watch more interviews with our award winners.

The Drum Awards Festival takes place from November 27 to December 1 and includes shows dedicated to specialisms such as PR, B2B, search and out-of-home. Find out more.