A short time ago, a good social media campaign meant letting people know you were on Facebook. Over the past few years, that’s changed dramatically, to the point where social campaigns meet and sometimes even exceed their traditional advertising counterparts in terms of creativity and innovation. Small wonder then that a lot of business executives now view social media as being as important as a corporate website and more traditional forms of online advertising.
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All the evidence suggests they’re right to think that way too. Research from eMarketer suggests that brands can profit dramatically from a well-executed social campaign and a 2012 study by research company Millward-Brown showed that there was a direct correlation between how successful a company is and how well it uses social media.
With that kind of spend comes serious incentive for innovation and The Bees Awards, a San Francisco-based award for the best use of social media, now in its fourth iteration aims to recognise the best examples of social media innovation. The awards have just announced the winners in 24 categories, whittled down from some 83 nominees.
For their fourth edition, The Bees Awards received social media marketing campaigns from six continents and 23 countries. While that diversity is perhaps not as widely reflected in the winning entries as it was in the nominations (more than half of the winning campaigns are from the US), campaigns from Russia and Brazil both managed represent emerging market countries with wins.
The Russian winning entry in the “Best Innovation” category, Blind, comes from the Hungry Boys agency and was one of the campaigns that we picked as being particularly strong when the nominations were announced. The campaign aims to change the treatment of blind children by giving people insight into what they go through. The primary way of doing this was with a website that challenged people to navigate a character through a virtual city using only sound.
Brazil’s winning entry meanwhile came in the “Best use of App for Social Media Marketing” category. The app, built for Bradesco F.Banking by AG2 Publicis Modem. The agency built a fully functional Facebook banking app for Bradesco, a top Brazilian bank. Capitalising on the social banking trend, the app came with the promise of the same level of security offered by internet banking. But it also leveraged the social power of Facebook by allowing people to create financial share and collaboration funds covering everything from money for humanitarian causes to money for a friend’s birthday party.
Winners in some of the other categories will perhaps have been more familiar to web users around the world. The winner in the viral video category, for instance, Bubba’s Hover from US agency Thinkmodo — which saw top golfer Bubba Watson riding around in a hovercraft modified to function as a golf cart — has racked up nearly 8-million views on YouTube.
The Dragon Shadow Launch campaign for the third season of hit show Game of Thrones, which took top honours in the Best Art Direction category, receivedseriousattentiononline. The ad, which was placed in The New York Times, had a dragon shadow covering a double spread in the paper over fake articles that hinted at plotlines from “Game of Thrones.”
The full list of winners, as well as nominees can be found below:
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