Marketing Excellence

Despite being held in Glasgow, the big winners at this year’s Marketing Excellence Awards came mainly from the east coast as The Leith Agency scooped Marketing Services Company of the Year, while CharteredBrands was the recipients of Brand Company of the Year.

Leith also won the Media prize for its Coors campaign, ‘Welcome to the Green Light District’, while CharteredBrands’ Asanka De Silva won Young Marketer of the Year.

Graham Atha, chairman of The Marketing Society in Scotland, singled out The Leith Agency for praise following the result. “Leith continues to go from strength to strength,” he said. “The last couple of years has been a challenge for them with their new direction; the new people involved; John Denholm moving on and the new structure at the top. They have a very strong team, especially in the way that they have been developing the brand, with Stripe, Blonde and Marvel. To be at the leading edge, 25 years on, is no mean achievement...the judges felt that the overall quality of the papers coming out of Leith, across a number of areas justified them winning the main prize against strong opposition.”

Atha continued by praising the work of CharteredBrands which was also in a heavily contested field. “In terms of Brand Company of the year, again there was some strong competition with VisitScotland, S&N and Glasgow City Marketing, which is doing a fantastic job on the brand. CharteredBrands is a really interesting brand management model which has broken the mould on how you approach brand marketing. Glen Gribbon and his team are doing some really exciting stuff, particularly on Pomegreat which has enjoyed phenomenal success over the last couple of years.”

He highlighted both Story and The Bridge as being “the unsung heroes” of the evening having also submitted some “very strong entries”.

Story won the award for Brand Development for its Viral for Ardbeg 1965, as well as winning the Direct Marketing category for Scottish and Southern Energy, ‘Stick with Us’.

The Bridge also won two awards, the Cause Related and Not for Profit awards, for ‘On the Offensive – How Marketing Helped Erskine Build its Relevance’ as well as the Internal Marketing award for the West of Scotland Cancer Awareness Project.

Winner of Marketer of the Year was Huw Pennell of Maxxium UK Limited, which also found itself taking the Sponsorship prize for Famous Grouse’s support of Scottish Rugby.

Other winners on the evening were VisitScotland for International Marketing; S&N UK took the Marketing Capabilities prize as well as the Promotional award; One O’Clock Gun won Best Business Start Up for the Imagination Workshop, and Edrington was the winner of the Design category, for Highland Park.

Lloyds TSB won Business Innovation, while Glasgow City Marketing was the Public Relations winner.

The winner of the Inaugural Alan Frame Memorial award for Marketing Achievements was Johnson Sustainable Seafoods for its much acclaimed ‘No Catch, Just Cod’.

“Alan would have been chuffed. Embarrassed, but chuffed,” says Atha of the award dedicated to Alan Frame’s memory. “Underneath he would have been very proud. It’s hugely important as far as Frame is concerned and all of the people who knew Alan. The Alan Frame Award will hopefully go on for many years to come and we will continue to remember a guy who didn’t just measure himself on talk, but it was about action and doing things and having success.”

The Union won the Event category for Historic Scotland, while The Town House Company was the winner of the Online category. 1576 was the winner of the Customer Insight award.

This year’s Student Marketer of the Year was Ionna Anagnostou from the University of Stirling.