Judges Comments
Best leader in Marketing Award -Brand
Winner: Melissa Reeve, Global Head of Strategic Brand Management, ASOS
Melissa Reeve — this is my favourite, thanks to the clarity of her success in growing the brand strategy department at ASOS as well as being a true people leader by co-founding the Women’s Initiative at ASOS; pushing DEI practices, and being the only working mum on the senior marketing team. Incredible strategic marketing story with great depth and scope, a brilliant role model in strategic marketing to 23.4 million customers globally.
Highly Commended
Jen Vile, Marketing Director, England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)
What a brilliant story of launching a diverse new sporting platform in lockdown; phenomenal marketing success story The Hundred Rising – the 100 opportunities for diverse talent is brilliant, truly game-changing in embedding the principle of embedding the men’s and women’s game on an equal platform.
The 300% increase in the marketing budget for the England women’s team is phenomenal.
Best Leader in Marketing Award -Agency
Winner: Tamara Littleton, CEO, Social Element
A true trailblazer in remote working, Innovative approach to the wellbeing of people – real unifying leader, drove phenomenal growth in the midst of the pandemic, groundbreaking all-female leadership team.
The Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to Marketing
Winner: Jackie Stevenson, Founder &Global CEO, The Brooklyn Brothers
A pioneer in the truest sense of the word and a true champion of the industry, revolutionized WACL turning it into a credible campaigning organization with the #flexiblefirst campaign providing a framework of fairness and equality to the industry.
Successfully lobbied the UK government to reinstate gender pay gap reporting. Brooklyn Brothers Night School is making tangible impacts and inroads into diversifying the industry’s talent pool.
The Change MakerAward – Brand
Winner: Nobunto Taengwa, Group Digital& Brand Executive, Cresta Hotels
- Disrupted Cresta Hotels model, directly impacting efficiency and profitability, Directly helped the business survive the pandemic, improving both the quality and the profitability of sales and reservations across the company’s 17 hotels, implemented this system, and trained an effective team, using hard data and soft skills
- Massive achievement selling her proposal internally, especially not coming from the hospitality sector.
The Change Maker Award- Agency
Winner: Virginia Delvin, CEO Current Global
- The epitome of true change-making on multiple levels. Her leadership is having a direct and profound impact on many – customers, brands, the marketing + creative industry, Completely changed agency value proposition, mission, and model through the lens of diversity + inclusion, all rooted in proprietary research.
- Future-proofing for brands in a changing D+I led landscape – long term movement, not just short term moment, Providing direct and tangible solutions for those with sight, hearing, speech, or cognitive disabilities
The One to Watch Award
Winner: Rachel Goodacre, Head of Product Marketing, Jacobs Engineering Group
Reading Rachel’s story is like reading a story of my own. Her fast growth proves that she knows what matters and where to to win. What’s more important is she appears to be a leader with strong passion, confidence, and an attitude for life-long learning. I look forward to following her and seeing her next milestones.
The Independent Consultant Award
Winner: Lucinda Gosling, Strategic Consultant & Founder Kaleidoscope Ltd
Lucinda’s entry is very impressive. Not only has she been a consultant at some of the world’s most famous agencies and companies; W+K, Vice/Vertue, BBC, and TikTok, she’s clearly quantifying the impact of her work throughout her entry. All of this is backed up by testimonials directly from industry leaders and a wide range of press coverage, very impressive!
Best Leader in Creating Change in health& wellness Award
Winner: Dr. Ankita Batla Chief Medical Office Patient Partnership Lead, VMLY&Rx
Where to begin with Dr. Ankita such an impressive career journey from being a medical doctor in India to transitioning to health communications, sharing just a couple of the highlights:
Dr. Ankita champions equality of opportunity, education, and health with gender diversity being a prominent feature
Led the first-ever partnerships between a comms company and an academic society dedicated to person-centered care
We could go on-Such a highly deserved WINNER!
Customer Experience Award
Winner: Deborah Owen-Ellis Clark, Director of Marketing, Places for People
Deborah has clearly demonstrated her passion and experience in driving CX in her long career, highlights include Places for People becoming a movement gaining ICS accreditation and winning multiple awards, Deborah has shown grassroots mobilization in her leadership and management of teams.
The PR Communicator of the Year Award
Winner: Jo-ann Robertson, CEO, Ketchum London
Jo-ann’s leadership at Ketchum has been transformational in all ways, from creativity to employee policies, she’s having a huge impact on the agency globally and has stepped up into a global role this year while raising two small children, and she is the only large agency leader to have achieved the Blueprint diversity mark.
The WIM Copywriting Award
Winner: Ruth Dalal Azar, Senior Copywriting, The Economist
Copy for a famous brand with a famous tone of voice may seem like an obvious choice but we can’t ignore how notoriously hard it is to get the writing right for The Economist. David Abbott set the style decades ago, and tales of how copywriters tried or failed to replicate it have often been the subject of blog posts, press articles, and interviews since. Such writing comes with such pressure but Ruth kept to the consistency everyone expects and made it feel fresh and new too.
WIM Storyteller of the Year Award
Winner: Kimeko McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter,Digiday
Kimeko McCoy’s self-intro strikes me deeply. I can see a fighter behind the screen she dedicates her energy and passion to support underrepresented women, but also she revealed the often unspoken struggles in women’s lives with her impressive storytelling. Her articles on the working mother’s challenges in an agency environment, and how a “Rebellious” agency rose with a team of ‘misfits’, are worth reading and being paid attention to by any marketing industry veteran who cares.
Kimeko McCoy the Next-Gen Marketing Journalist-one to watch
The Marketing Scientist Award
Winner: Dr. Lucy Gill-Simmen, Senior Lecturer in Marketing & Director of Education Strategy, Royal Holloway University of London
Dr. Gill-Simmen’s course promotes very relevant knowledge, skills, and social awareness required in the contemporary workplace. That the course design was informed by a research project exemplifies the best practice in rigorous, evidence-based pedagogical innovations. Particularly noteworthy is the attention to such skills and qualities as empathy, understanding of inclusivity, and the use of innovative teaching methods via incorporating arts approaches into a marketing degree course.
The WIM Company Award
Winner: ASOS
ASOS is at the start of its journey, it’s been impressive to see how they have incorporated empathy and been proactive in key intersections in equality and equity with their talent, spotlighting some of their initiatives- April 2021, launching an industry-leading Future Leaders Programme, a 13-month development programme. A sustained commitment to diversifying their pipeline to improve female and under-represented racial representation in leadership, engineering product, and science roles.
ASOS are building the foundations that could lead to them setting the benchmark for the industry.