It was quite a surprise for SMU’s marketing team when they were called up to the stage by their advertising agency during the prize presentation at Marketing Magazine’s Agency of the Year 2013 awards on 16 May 2013. Little did they know that the agency, Wild Advertising & Marketing, had boldly based their entries for the awards wholly on the work they had co-created with SMU.
The SMU Undergraduate Admissions 2012 campaign won outright in two of the 15 “Best Idea” awards: Best Idea – Integrated Media and Best Idea – Print. Some 750 leading advertising and marketing professionals gathered at the Shangri-La Hotel for the awards dinner applauded SMU’s audacious double victory. Like all effective advertising campaigns, the work was the result of close collaboration and shared expertise between the client (SMU) and agency, as well as a lot of late nights and lost weekends in the latter stages of development.
Marketing Magazine’s Agency of the Year awards is seen as a barometer of agency performance and is the only awards in the world that is 100% judged by client marketers. The panel of 21 judges included marketing directors from 21 companies, including 3M Singapore, Adidas South East Asia, HSBC Singapore, MasterCard, PricewaterhouseCoopers Singapore, UBS Wealth Management Asia Pacific and Unilever Singapore, as well as Benny Toh, SMU’s Head of Corporate Marketing. They were not permitted to judge entries in which their companies were participating.
SMU has won a slew of awards in recent months, including a Silver medal at SPH's 2012 Iink Awards; Marketing Magazine’s Excellence in Advertising 2013, Marketing Magazine’s Excellence in Integrated Marketing 2013; three awards at the 2013 Mob-Ex for Best Brand Awareness, Best Integration of Mobile and Best Original Content, and most recently Acquia Partner Site of the Year Award 2013 in the Higher Education category.
Related:
SMU’s website wins top-of-the class global design award
Up close and personal with the digital generation.
[Featured photo: On stage to receive their awards, members of SMU’s Marketing team in OCCM: Managers Mervyn Chen Sihao (1st on L), Rosanne Luo Xueshan (3rd from L) and Michael Ng (4th from L); and Head of Corporate Marketing, BennyToh (receiving the award from the presenter); together with team members from Wild Advertising & Marketing.]