This year I have had the honor to be in the jury for the Swedish PR awards Spinn 2009. I’ve been impressed by the amount of creative work that Swedish PR and advertising agencies create for their clients, and even more of the business value these campaigns have delivered. Public relations once again demonstrates how valueable and cost efficient it can be in driving business goals. But even more apparent was that almost all successful activities this year had a digital element to it. It is no longer unique to be active in social media channels when launching PR initiatives.
On Thursday night this week, the prizes were handed out at a gala dinner in Stockholm and the gold in the digital category went to the Swedish movie Kenny Begins. The campaign cleverly used social media channels such as Facebook groups (Kenny Begins – The Countdown) in combination with traditional marketing to engage with potential fans and create a buzz in the target audience early on. The character Kenny Starfighter currently has 1,740 fans on Facebook.
Client: Nordisk Film
Agency: Prime PR.
One of two silver prizes went to technical consulting firm ÅF, previously Ångpanneföreningen, for the digital rectruiting campaign Welcome to the List. An almost empty site was launched with the objective to recruit 100 programmers and developers. The get on the top ten list you had to program your way through the campaign site. The campaign brilliantly excluded non-programmers and instead focused on creating the right word-of-mouth in the main target group.
Client: ÅF
Agencies: Jung, Peacock and Lonley Duck.
The second silver went to the Swedish Tourist Association for a blogging campagin called “The most Swedish job in Sweden“, in which a young man travelled through Sweden in 60 days and documented his experiences via social media.
Client: STF
Agency: Syrup
Tags: public relations, pris, spinn, pr. Ping.