Grab a free copy of The Drum magazine and celebrate the very best in creative strategy
What do a BBC all-staff email, an NHS nurse recruitment drive, a rug celebrating an all-female Afghan orchestra and an AR app telling the stories of Harriet Tubman, Gertrude Stein and Sacagawea all have in common?
Grab a free copy of The Drum magazine's June and July issues
They are all, of course, Grand Prix winners at The Drum Awards. And they all feature in the latest issue of The Drum magazine (or the latest issues, even, with two new print products landing on doormats and desks today). And, we are offering readers of our website a free copy while stocks last!
The first mag, our Creativity Issue, is a compendium of mind-blowing work, where ideas, invention and ingenuity are brought into sharp focus. It even has a cover created by the most creative agency in the world, McCann New York (we can call them that with complete confidence, having examined 2,748 campaigns from 2,520 clients by 1,744 agencies and involving 582 chief creative officers, 892 executive creative directors, 2,461 creative directors, 2,107 copywriters and 2,264 art directors for our World Creative Rankings, which you’ll get a peak at inside).
The issue also looks at The Drum Design Awards and a Grand Prix-winning campaign from Williams Murray Hamm that juror Stephen Haggerty says filled him with “rage, disgust and sadness, but also a wonderful feeling of optimism and possibility”. In there too you’ll find every winner of the Chip Shop Awards and the Roses Awards as we celebrate creativity in all its guises and sizes, from the local to the global, the physical to the intangible and the present to the future.
In the second mag out today, we turn our attention to creativity’s cousin, with our Strategy Issue celebrating the problem solvers for whom efficiencies and effectiveness and tactics and targets are as sexy as any invention or ingenuity.
At The Drum Marketing Awards, we hear the story of how MullenLowe has been helping to keep the UK’s National Health Service in fine health, and we speak to Zenith Media about how it has been tackling taboos with Tena. At the Online Media Awards, we talk to the titles whose tactics are increasingly turning to cause-related content, The Times’s John Witherow telling us: “We are not just reporting on change, we are providing solutions and fighting to make a difference.” You’ll also find all of the winners of the Digital Advertising Awards and the Search Awards.
But of course, creativity for creativity’s sake or strategy for strategy’s sake is never going to be as meaningful or powerful as when the two play out together, and it is this creative strategy (or strategic creativity if you prefer) that you’ll find in all of our winners. It is this symbiosis that marks out our most agile companies and with disruption across the entire industry right now, it will be those with the supplest and most creative strategies that survive these challenging times where everything requires reassessing.
As ITV’s Lara Izlan puts it in the Strategy Issue: “In order to realize the opportunities this disruption presents, all players need to be comfortable in deviating from the status quo and experimenting with new models.”
The brands that come out on top will be those that listen to and learn from their consumers as they adopt new habits, because, as Johnson & Johnson’s Matthew Fantazier tells us, “what got you here today probably won’t get you to where you need to go tomorrow”.
If you’d like to receive a free copy of The Drum, just head here.