The 2024 Marketing Week Awards winners were revealed at a ceremony in Leicester Square last night, with Warner Bros. Discovery UK&I, Marks & Spencer, BBC and Lidl among the companies recognised at the event, sponsored by Ozone.

Warner Bros. Discovery UK & Ireland claimed the coveted Grand Prix award and the prize for Multichannel Marketing for its integrated Barbie campaign, which contributed to the movie’s record-breaking commercial success.

The wide-ranging campaign, which saw the UK painted pink, ran across out-of-home (OOH), social, TV, experiential, radio and brand partnerships. It was designed to build hype and overcome misconceptions about the film being for kids.

The campaign helped Barbie become the biggest UK box office release for Warner Bros. ever, grossing £18.4m in its first three days alone. It also delivered the highest UK launch week awareness of any Warner Bros. release in the studio’s 100-year history.

Marks & Spencer was awarded the prestigious Brand of the Year Award for reinvigorating its style perceptions and engaging customers in new ways since launching its ‘Reshape for Growth’ strategy two years ago. During the past 12 months, 80% of M&S sales were full price, highlighting that this strategy is paying off.

Having increased its focus on digital customer experience and image perception, the brand posted strong interim results for the 26 weeks ending 28 September, with pre-tax profit up 17.2% to £407.8m and online sales up by 11.3%.

Meanwhile, PwC CMO Antonia Wade was crowned Marketer of the Year. She was selected from a shortlist of the highest-rated marketers in Marketing Week’s Top 100, sponsored by Digitas.

The global marketing boss has made a significant impact since joining the business in July 2021. She’s helped lead PwC’s global strategy, The New Equation while advising the global board on marketing strategy and pushing brand awareness.

In 2023, PwC won over 70 awards for its thought leadership and campaigns, launched a CMO Marketing Academy to upskill over 1,000 marketers globally, and accelerated its brand and ABM programmes. Overall, PwC reported record global revenues of $55.4bn (£42.9bn) for the year ended 30 June.

PwC’s Antonia Wade named Marketer of the Year

The BBC was awarded Marketing Team of the Year for rebooting the culture to position itself as a strategic partner. The marketers focused on driving audiences to BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds in a bid to shift from a 100-year-old institution to a modern media brand.

The energy put in over the past three years helped the BBC marketers transition from “servants” to strategic partners and the BBC delivered double-digit growth in marketing impact, significant uplifts in campaign KPIs and a re-energised corporate culture.

Elsewhere, Lidl won the Long Term Brand Building award for embarking on a five-year mission to democratise quality and overcome the ‘Lidl lag’. In 2019, the supermarket’s customer penetration and basket spend were behind its competitors and quality perceptions were in decline. To overcome this, the brand focused on its ‘Big On Quality’ message with longer adverts, amplified its comms around industry-awarded products and appeared at more immersive events.

In June, the grocer achieved its highest-ever market share in the grocery sector in the 12 weeks to 12 May, with 8.1% of the market, compared to 7.7% in the same period last year.

NHS Blood and Transplant took home two awards: one for PR and Brand Storytelling and the other for Health and Life Sciences, both for its campaign highlighting the plight of the 233 young people on the organ transplant waiting list.

To highlight the experiences of children on the register, the brand created the ‘Waiting to Live’ campaign, which saw 233 handmade dolls – representing the 233 children – placed in UK hospitals and GP surgeries.

The campaign generated 750 pieces of media coverage and 1.5 billion earned media impressions, reached 1 million plus people through organic social media, and drove a 10% uplift in under-18s opting in to register to donate, equating to more than 5,000 registrations.

Category winners

The Sport, Gaming and Entertainment award went to Norwich City Football Club for highlighting men’s mental health for Mental Health Day. Working entirely in-house, the Norwich City marketing team produced a poignant short film featuring the hashtag #YouAreNotAlone, suggesting that just because someone appears fine on the surface, it doesn’t mean they are. The video has been viewed over 300 million times in over 150 countries across the club’s channels and user-generated content.

Elsewhere, Aldi won the award for Best Use of a Small Budget for hacking the news cycle and social buzz around the Chanel Métiers d’Art fashion show featuring Kate Moss. The brand hired a lookalike to shop in its stores with the aim of driving fame for the brand’s low prices. The stunt generated over £65m worth of earned media coverage without spending a single penny on traditional advertising.

Meanwhile, the Retail and Ecommerce award went to KFC for its ‘anti-UGC’ campaign that saw the brand flip the Christmas turkey hype on its head with a week-long teaser campaign hinting that it would succumb to the demands for ‘KFT’. The campaign returned £0.47 in pure profit for every £1 spent.

Russell Parsons, editor-in-chief of Marketing Week, says, “Marketing drives the growth of brands and businesses. It impacts culture and society. It matters. And our award winners embody this. Congratulations to all.”

The full list of 2024 Marketing Week Awards winners will be available to view on the Winners’ Showcase shortly.