UM Australia wins Agency of the Year at Festival of Media Awards
UM Australia was named Agency of the Year at The Festival of Media Awards in Rome this week.
The agency also won the Campaign of the Year award for its XTL work, which sought to address physical violence in relationships by encouraging teens to be respectful in their early relationships and learn new ways to interact with one another in a bid to prevent violence later in life.
UM also won awards for two other campaigns in Australia: News Corps’ ‘Fast Front Pages’ (Silver, Best Communications Strategy) and ING Direct’s ‘Spend Your Lunch Well’ (Gold, Best Entertainment Platform).
‘We hear much talk about the need for brands to have a purpose beyond their core benefit, to use social as a natural pathway to their audience, and to have something simple to say to them which resonates. XTL ticked all these boxes in a way and to a level that no other entry came close to,’ said Tom Gill, global media director of Heineken and one of the judges.
Meanwhile, Agency Network of the Year went to the Starcom MediaVest Group.
Starcom’s winning entries hailed from Poland, the Philippines, United Kingdom, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, and Sweden.
Sameer Singh, VP, head of global media at GlaxoSmithKline and chair of the 2014 Awards Jury, added: ‘It’s truly fascinating to see so many campaigns like ‘XTL’ using social media for focused, targeted outreach, and actually succeeding in changing people’s behaviour and opinions. More than ever before, marketers are seeing the value of reaching out to specific audiences through social media – brilliant propositions and clever execution rule in the entries we judged from all over the world.’
To view the full list of winners at the Festival of Media Global Awards, click here.
