The gala dinner BOLD Awards VI ceremony for category finalists was held this year in Lisbon, Portugal. Among the winners, three particularly stood out to me as a lesson on how to maximise the return on time and cost of entering and attending awards programmes. Winning awards is great marketing!
BILI Social (which stands for Because I Love It) is a Canadian marketing agency that has created a marketplace where brand owners can identify and contact influencers who have a genuine affinity with their brand. BILI’s co-founder and CEO Adrian Capobianco collected the Boldest Marketplace award for himself, and picked up another two for BILI clients! They were Giuseppe Pizza which won Boldest CPG Brand (Consumer Packaged Goods), and Finish: The Torture Test Challenge for Boldest Sustainability. What could better show the benefits they provide to their clients?
…and dos Santos is a business transformation agency based in Berlin. They entered their client Deutsche Bahn, the German state rail operator, and won the BOLD Awards Boldest Future of Work category in 2023. The logo for this achievement sits proudly on their website. This year, the two founding partners Jutta dos Santos Miquelino and Ricardo dos Santos Miquelino entered their Collective Intelligence Design programme that supports client transformation through embracing collaboration and AI-enabled solutions. It won the Boldest Crowdsourcing category.
The third one that really stood out for me was three category winner FundamentalVR. This medtech startup founded by Chris Scattergood has created a surgical equivalent of a flight simulator, which allows surgeons to both advance their skills and rehearse delicate or intricate procedures. They submitted three separate entries and won three categories:
Boldest AI, for FundamentalVR itself in improving surgical performance:
Boldest AR/VR, for its work with the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) to try and prevent childhood blindness through VR simulation;
Boldest Healthtech, for its collaboration with Philips to deliver economical and scalable VR training solutions.
These three very impressive service providers in their various fields of business have each worked out how to win awards on a global stage, impress their clients and collaborative partners, and bring themselves to the attention of new ones.
I’m pretty sure their strategies for success are transferable to other awards programmes – but you heard them first here.
Congratulations to all the winners, and to the other finalists and category judges who made it to Lisbon. The full list of BOLD Awards VI winners is available at https://bold-awards.com/bold-awards-vi-winners/