BBC Global News took the top title of Best in Show at the 2016 Spark Awards for media excellence held at the Four Seasons Hotel Singapore tonight.
The media giant walked away with the prize after securing three gold awards in the categories, Best Event by a Media Owner, Best Programme Promotion and Best Insights and Research Project by a Media Owner and one silver for Best Media Solution – Social Media.
The Spark Awards, now in its third edition, celebrates Southeast Asia, South Asia and ANZ’s best media solutions, products and services from media owners, publishers and ad technology companies.
Campaigns that helped BBC Global News over the line this year included “BBC Football Connect”, an event which brought together media agencies in Mumbai for a Friday football tournament as a way to engage media planners and buyers in a fun atmosphere. Also in the mix was “The Science of Engagement”, a unique research project led by BBC Storyworks which involved facial recognition and tracking of over 5,000 international news consumers to understand their emotional responses to content marketing.
Tied in a very close second were Astro Radio and ABS-CBN Corporation.
Astro Radio showed that traditional still has what it takes by bagging three gold for Best Creative Team, Best Media Solution – Integrated Media and Best Media Solution – Radio as well as a Bronze for Best Media Solution – Radio. Its campaigns included a user-generated content idea for the Tsubaki hair product brand, a reality road trip campaign for Merdeka (Independence Day) and Petronas and more.
Meanwhile ABS-CBN Corporation had an impressive trophy haul for clients including Unilever, McDonald’s and the Philippine Star which consisted of two gold for Best Media Solution – Social Media and Best Use of Branded Content by a Media Owner as well as two silver for Best Acquisition Team and Best Media Solution – Integrated Media and a bronze for Best Media Solution – Experiential.
Sociomantic Labs also impressed the judges with its mobile campaign to help Indonesian shopping app and marketplace, Bukalapak, understand and re-engage its idle app users by implementing the programmatic solution AppKit.
The senior jury of 24 influential agency and media experts had a tough job this year as many media owners were tied on 10 points according to the awards’ exponential-weighted point system, meaning four points are allocated for gold, two points for silver and one point for bronze. This included Opera Mediaworks, Moving Walls, GMA Network and Clear Channel Singapore. Other high scoring winners of the night were Media Prima Television Networks, iflix and RadiumOne, Mediacorp OOH Media, Singapore Press Holdings and Star Media Group.
2016 marked record involvement in the awards with many new entrants from countries such as Indonesia and Australia. The Spark Awards 2016 was supported by partners AdParlor Asia Pacific, Cellarmaster Wines, Graphiss Productions and Peroni.
