From BrewDog to P&G, revisit every winner from The Drum Awards for Marketing since 2009

With a new look for 2023, The Drum Awards for Marketing will continue to reward the best work, companies, and people, but will now include a host of new categories for sectors and disciplines.

Here we celebrate the Grand Prix’s of the past and remember over a decade of marketing brilliance.

2009

Agency: Purple Circle

Client: Bewilderwood

Campaign: Marketing a Swamp

Starting with the rather unlikely ingredients of a swamp in Norfolk and an old Etonian whose Dad was the arch-enemy of James Bond, Purple Circle built an adventure park brand on real values to get children back out into the wilderness. Bewilderwood visitors per year almost doubled with 110,000 for year one, followed by 136,000 for year two and 25% above target in year three.

2010

Agency: Principles Agency

Client: NHS Calderdale

NHS Calderdale needed to increase the number of women breastfeeding in the Halifax area, especially in an under-indexing audience of young women aged 16-24 in some of the more deprived neighborhoods. Involvement from the local community meant that the campaign was successfully implemented in the first six months of 2009, and the insight work was responsible for the success of this campaign where other national campaigns had failed.

2011

Companies: Rethink and Mind

Campaign: Don't Get Me Wrong

In the autumn of 2010, Rethink and Mind developed ‘Don’t Get Me Wrong’ to move people along from being aware of mental health discrimination to realizing that they are responsible for stigma and discrimination. The campaign reached 22 million adults.

2012

Brand: Brewdog

Campaign: Equity for Punks

Brewdog was looking to raise funds in order to finance a new eco brewery in Aberdeen. Manifest was tasked to raise a target of £1m by inviting beer fans to invest in the business in a unique IPO scheme that allowed ‘fanvestors’ to buy equity in Brewdog via a dedicated website. Within just two days, ‘fanvestors’ had spent £500,000 on shares – well beyond expectations and enough to generate its own coverage.

2013

Agency: UM London

Brand: Royal Mail

Campaign: Gold Medal Winner Stamps

During London 2012, Royal Mail decided to print special edition stamps in tribute to each Team GB Gold Medal Winner, in order to drive stamp sales and make stamp collecting ‘cool’ for a new generation. In a Royal Mail-first, they made them available in Post Offices the next day. Over £18m of stamps were sold, exceeding expectations by 45% and almost £8m of stamps were bought in Post Offices nationwide.

2014

Agency: Maverick Group

Company: Gibraltar Football Association

Campaign: We’re Ready

In March 2013, Maverick spent six days with select individuals from the Gibraltarian National Team. Maverick’s crews followed them in everything they did, in their homes, at work and on the pitch. The film was created to highlight how these players juggle their sporting and working lives, and how much playing for their national team means to them. Following two rejections, Gibraltar became Uefa's 54th member nation in 2013 after the European ruling body voted for its inclusion at its congress in London.

2015

Agency: Holler and Leo Burnett

Client: Always

Campaign: Like a Girl

In 2014, Always launched the next stage in ensuring that girls everywhere would keep their confidence throughout puberty and beyond by tackling societal limitations that stand in their way. Since then, #LikeAGirl has gone from a simple phrase to a powerful and empowering movement. The ad saw 90m+ views and 1100+ earned-media placements as well as 4.4bn+ media impressions in the first three months.

2016

Agency: Pablo

Client: NHS Blood and Transplant

Campaign: Give Blood – Bleed for England

Pablo helped NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) empower the nation to Bleed For England by generating 100,000 new blood donor registrations during a national distraction, The Rugby World Cup. It became the most effective donor registration campaign ever run by NHSBT and over the course of just 10 weeks, it delivered 101,295 new registrations.

2017

Agencies: Chi & Partners, Mindshare, All Together Now & Sky Media

Brand: Argos

Campaign: Transformation from ‘catalog king’ to a digital retail leader

Chi & Partners, Mindshare, All Together Now and Sky Media came together with Argos when faced with a rapidly changing retail landscape. The catalog retailer needed to be reintroduced to the modern shopper as a true omni-channel retailer. Argos launched an exciting and fast-paced campaign that positioned the brand to the current consumer, increasing turnover year-on-year in the process.

2018 EMEA

Agency: Taylor Herring

Client: Samsung

Campaign: Spin Cycle

Taylor Herring made TV history with the screening of a head-spinning new Samsung ad, the longest single shot commercial ever screened in the UK – featuring nothing but a washing machine. In the same month, it screened a 66-minute film of a complete 40-degree wash cycle, with an original score by Hollywood composer Michael Nyman.

2019 EMEA

Agency: Taylor Herring

Client: Greggs

Campaign: Valentine’s Day at Greggs

Greggs the Bakers chose to poke fun at itself with a classy Valentine’s Day stunt. The activity, devised by Taylor Herring offered enthralled couples the chance to have an in-store fine-dining experience through the Open Table platform.

2019 USA

Agency: The Martin Agency

Client: Land O’ Lakes

Campaign: She-I-O

The agricultural cooperative collaborated with a Nashville artist and Grammy-winning songwriter to rewrite farming’s most iconic song, Old MacDonald, into She-I-O, a power anthem celebrating female farmers.

2020 EMEA

Agency: MullenLowe Group UK

Client: NHS England

Campaign: We Are Nurses. We are the NHS.

To coincide with the 70th anniversary of the NHS, a new campaign was launched to focus on the retention and recruitment of the next generation of nurses. The ad shows real people and real moments from all walks of nursing life: mental health nurses, learning disability nurses, and district and hospital-based.

2020 USA

Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners

Client: Daughters of the Evolution

Campaign: Lessons in Herstory

Daughters of the Evolution collaborated with Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) to address the fact that 89% of textbook references are devoted to men. It launched Lessons in Herstory, an app that uses augmented reality to celebrate stories of women typically omitted from history textbooks. The app earned 110k downloads with $0 spent.

2021

Agency: Mindshare UK

Client: KFC

Campaign: No more finger lickin'

During the pandemic, KFC decided to temporarily put its iconic slogan on hold. Finger lickin' was out, hand washing was in. KFC canned months of work almost overnight, dropping a TV ad and billboards. It was the first time it pioneered a total social media takeover across five apps and reached over 34.2m people in under 48 hours.

2022

Agency: PHD UK

Client: Diageo

Campaign: #LooksLikeGuinness

While many of us were longing for that creamy first sip of satisfaction in the pub after the lockdown in 2021, Guinness produced a film celebrating the reopening of pubs and bars in the UK. The campaign was seen by 72% of UK adults (39 million) while Guinness was the UK’s most-talked-about beer brand on social media in the run-up to reopening day on May 19, 2021.

The Drum Awards for Marketing are currently open for entry. Find out how you can enter now.