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PRCA MENA is pleased to announce that the Hill+Knowlton Strategies team of Mohamad Saber and Peter Hermina have won the MENA Young Lions PR Competition with their campaign ‘Half a Million Dollars.’ They will go on to represent the region in the PR Young Lions Competition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, sponsored by the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO).

This year was the third year PRCA MENA has ran the competition and this year saw over 28 entries from teams of two under the age of 30, all responding to a brief from Education for Employment, which performed as the ‘client’. Each team then had 24 hours to create a creative and effective campaign, followed by a five-minute presentation.

Commenting on Saber and Hermina’s campaign, the judges said that the team produced “an honest, fully connected, and creative campaign that worked and was presented with great passion with a great ability to think on their feet”.

“It was inspiring to see the amount of passion, creativity and energy being put into the PRCA MENA Young Lions entries,” said Alex Malouf, Jury Chair for this year. “The short-listed entries combined sharp insights, innovative strategies and extensive use of measurement. The finalists made our decision very tough at the end of the day, and I’m confident that the PRCA MENA Young Lions winners will do the region justice in Cannes.”

Leanne Foy MPRCA, General Manager, PRCA MENA, said: “I would like to congratulate Mohamed and Peter on their win. We wish the pair the best of luck in Cannes where I am sure they will do the industry and the UAE proud.”

The PRCA MENA Awards 2018 celebrated the very best individuals, teams, and campaigns from the PR and communications industry from across the Middle East and North Africa.

Leading practitioners attended the awards at the Renaissance Downtown in Dubai on the evening of Wednesday, 21^st February. The event, hosted by broadcaster and journalist Katie Fielder, saw consultancies, individuals, and in-house teams compete for awards in 15 categories.

The big winners of the night were Seven Media and Brazen, winning two awards each. Seven Media won Large Agency of the year for the second year running, and also Best Digital campaign for ‘Bring George Home’ for Barasti. Q Communications was highly commended for its work with ‘Living the Voss Lifestyle’ in the Best Digital Campaign category.

Brazen won the Media Relations category with ‘Brazen gets behind the wheel with Careem’, with Seven Media being highly commended in the same category for its work with ‘Novo Cinemas’.

Brazen also won the Small Agency of the year category. Instinctif Partners was highly commended in the same category. Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority won the in-house team of the year award.

Markettiers won the Results on a Budget award for its ‘IMG World of Adventures – Dino Time’ campaign, and Weber Shandwick picked up highly commended for the campaign ‘Children’s National’.

Lauren Brush MPRCA, Senior Communications Consultant, Active DMC, won Rising Star of the Year. David Willett MPRCA, Head of Digital/SDAM, Weber Shandwick, was highly commended for the Rising Star of the Year Award. The PR Leader of the Year was awarded to Lucy O’Brien MPRCA, General Manager and Partner, FleishmanHillard.

Best B2B Campaign was awarded to Toh for its work with ‘Boom Supersonic – Heralding the New Jet Age’ and highly commended was handed to Yardstick Marketing for its work with RSM.

Best B2C Campaign was awarded to Hill+Knowlton Strategies for its ‘Arla Brand Launch’ campaign. Weber Shandwick was highly commended for its work with McDonalds.

The Best Influencer Relations award was handed to BPG Cohn & Wolfe for its work on ‘Hotels.com’. Joton picked up the highly commended award in that category.

Weber Shandwick won the Best Crisis Campaign award for its ‘FAB Merger’ campaign.

Impact Porter Novelli was awarded the Best Integrated Campaign award for its ‘Centrepoint Family Clock’ campaign. Marriott was highly commended for its ‘Ramadan with Marriott’ campaign.

Regional Campaign of the Year was awarded to Matrix PR for its campaign ‘Face It All With Himalaya’. Shamal Communications was highly commended for its work with ‘Arabian Travel Market’.

The newly added Game Changer Category was won by Edelman with the campaign ‘SYFY- Channel Zero, no Ends House TV Series Launch’. Highly commended was awarded to Hill+Knowlton Strategies with the campaign ‘Music on the Fairways: Changing the Game of Golf with HSBC’.

Leanne Foy MPRCA, General Manager, PRCA MENA, said: “It is a great pleasure to announce the winners of the PRCA MENA Awards 2018. The breadth and depth of the campaigns, teams, and individuals that we’ve seen this year demonstrates the strength of communications across the region.”

The full list of winners:

Large Agency of the Year

Winner – Seven Media

Small Agency of the Year

Winner – Brazen

Highly Commended – Instinctif Partners

In-House Team of the Year

Winner – Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority

PR Leader

Winner – Lucy O’ Brien

Rising Star

Winner – Lauren Brush

Highly Commended – David Willet

Best PR Campaign: Crisis Campaign

Winner – Weber Shandwick ‘FAB Merger’

Best PR Campaign: Integrated 

Winner – Impact Porter Novelli – ‘Centrepoint Family Clock’

Highly Commended – Marriott – ‘Ramadan with Marriott’

Best PR Campaign: Digital 

Winner – Seven Media – ‘Barasti #BringGeorgeHome’

Highly Commended – Q Communications – ‘Living the Voss Lifestyle’

Best PR Campaign: Regional Campaign of the Year

Winner – Matrix PR – ‘Face It All With Himalaya’

Highly Commended – Shamal Communications – ‘Arabian Travel Market’

Best PR Campaign: Results on a Budget

Winner – Markettiers – ‘IMG Worlds of Adventure – Dino Time’

Highly Commended – Weber Shandwick – ‘Childrens National’

Best PR Campaign: Game Changer 

Winner – Edelman – ‘SYFY- Channel Zero, No Ends House TV Series Launch’

Highly Commended – Hill+Knowlton Strategies – ‘Music on the Fairways: Changing the Game of Golf with HSBC’

Best PR Campaign: Business to Business 

Winner – Toh – ‘Boom Supersonic – Heralding the New Jet Age’

Highly Commended – Yardstick Marketing – ‘RSM a Tax and Auditory Firm, Prepping Itself for VAT’

Best PR Campaign: Business to Consumer

Winner – Hill+Knowlton Strategies – ‘Arla Brand Launch’

Highly Commended – Weber Shandwick – ‘Beef Nation’

Best PR Campaign: Media Relations 

Winner – Brazen – ‘Brazen Gets Behind the Wheel with Careem’

Highly Commended – Seven Media – ‘Novo Cinemas’

Best PR Campaign: Influencer Relations

Winner – BPG Cohn & Wolfe – ‘Hotels.com #tasteofexploring’

Highly Commended – Joton – ‘Launch of Royal Velvet & Wonderwall’

I have been helping a number of clients to write award entries recently and noticed one area where everyone seems to have a block.  Passion and excitement over-rides results. It’s not that they don’t mention achievements at all, but they don’t link closely enough to what the client was trying to achieve.

As a judge, it might surprise you to know that the way most judges look at an award entry is in this order

• What was the brief?
• What were the results?
• Do the results match what the brief asked?
• Do the results look good against this?

And if the results don’t match the objectives or feel worth all the effort – we move on. It may seem brutal, but often I don’t even read ‘what we did’ and certainly don’t look at the supporting material.

So if you want to win an award, you need to spend the most time on demonstrating your results, rather than hours on making your press cuttings look pretty.

I wrote a blog on judging the CorpComms awards, 10 inside secrets to winning an award – from the judges), to give a feel for how it works to be a judge.  While every award has its own process, the principles are the same – what was this campaign meant to achieve and how well did you do against that goal?

If you want to follow up in more detail, I am delivering courses for the PRCA on How to Write a Killer Award Entry – a half day on Tuesday 24 October in Dubai and a second one later this year in London, in November.

Of course, for any award you have to have done something that stands out, is new and innovative and achieved great results.  That is a given.  But too often people who are writing the award entries get carried away with passion and excitement about a highlight eg a celebrity came to our event – and forget to write it as an AWARD ENTRY.

So what should your award entry look like? The PRCA MENA guidelines say they are looking for ‘campaigns that can demonstrate strategy, research, execution, creativity, originality, and documented results and evaluation’. An entry needs to tell the whole story and demonstrate impact.

1. Tailor your entry to the specific awards and the category

You would not believe how many people enter exactly the same award entry into two or three different categories eg best web design and best consumer campaign.

It feels lazy and to be honest, most judges feel if you can’t be bothered to ‘answer the question’, then why should they be bothered to judge it?  Judges do these things on a voluntary basis.

You would not expect to see the same objectives for the website as a total campaign?  With a website you would probably want to see the focus of goals and evaluation on site visitors and conversion rates. With the consumer campaign you would expect to see all aspects of a campaign, from research through to the impact on the business and including media coverage, events, relationships built – and then how you helped sales or other key business indicators.

2. Clarity of objectives

I know many clients still see media coverage as the ultimate aim of a PR campaign. But if they get loads of great coverage and no-one buys their products – is that a success?

The more you can relate your campaign to clear business objectives, the more the judges will love you!

I liked the way DMCC (Dubai Multi Commodities Centre) had a very clear objective to generate leads – this campaign was last year’s winner in PRCA MENA’s best integrated campaign. They had all sorts of activities and results but the final point in their evaluation is ‘Most critically, 798 qualified business leads were generated via report downloads’.

3. Create an audit trail for your award entry

When you start explaining what you actually did, you want to relate these back to the problem you are solving.

Let’s imagine we are writing the entry on a campaign to recruit top IT graduates.  What I have seen too often is that the strategy might talk about targeting IT graduates from India.  And then the entry lists lots of media coverage in local media.  It may be that there are a lot of people living locally who have relatives in India and there is evidence that they will share with family back home. But you need to explain why this coverage was relevant.

For every activity, make sure it is clear how this links back to the strategy and how it achieves results.

4. Supporting evidence

Supporting evidence needs to be clearly laid out and linked back to the goals and evaluation. Brazen PR won the PR and content marketing award last year in the PRCA MENA awards for their campaign with Wendy burgers in the Gulf region. This is a good example of laying out your evidence distinctively and making it easy for the judges.

5. Results and evaluation

As I said, results are probably the most important part of your entry. Make sure they link back to the objectives and check – do these feel good?! Some clients are reluctant to reveal sensitive trade information – such as sales and visitor numbers.  In these cases, try and show the business impact by using percentage growth figures.  You could even get your client to say ‘This campaign helped us reach our sales targets for launch’.

If you want help with how you turn your great campaigns into killer winners, do come to one of our PRCA training sessions.  You can send me your draft entries in advance and I will include as many as possible in the training session.

Good luck!