BMS Awards: Autumn winners announced

POSTED ON: 29/03/18 TAGS: BMS Awards Seasonal Member Meeting

by BMS

The best marketing campaigns for the period September-December 2017 were announced at the Book Marketing Society’s meeting held at Hachette’s offices on 26th March.

There was particularly strong competition in both the Adult Fiction and Guerrillla (for campaigns costing less than £2,500) categories, with the judges choosing two Highly Commended in the first of these, Adult Fiction:  firstly, Fleur Clarke’s well-targeted campaign at Hodder for Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties. In addition, Hattie Adam- Smith, Rebecca Ikin, Amber Bennett-Ford of Cornerstone’s (Penguin Random House) stunning in-house campaign for Uncommon Type, a debut short story collection by Tom Hanks. The winner, however, was Sarah Arratoon of Pan Macmillan for her out-of-the-box, intertextual campaign for A Column of Fire by Ken Follett, which used ‘Pigeonhole’ to launch a unique, pre-publication serialisation of the book, and included chapter samples within video game boxes, through an offline partnership with Daedalic.

Highly commended in the Guerrilla campaign category was Victoria Abbott of Headline for her work on A Year of Wonder by Clemency Burton-Hill, creating innovative playlists and bespoke video messages on Apple Music to reach a diverse audience. Heather Keane and Naomi Berwin of Hodder & Stoughton were also highly commended for the creative and far- reaching social media campaign associated with The World Cup of Everything by Richard Osman. But the outstanding winner in this category was the fantastically successful campaign run – on a tiny budget, in an incredibly quick turn-around period- by Flora Willis of Profile Books for Mary Beard’s Women and Power.

In this season’s huge and rich Adult Non-fiction category, Justine Gold’s campaign at Simon & Schuster UK for The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur, John Grindrod’s campaign for Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Crows (Faber and Faber) and Jodie Mullish of Bluebird’s (Pan Macmillan) socially conscious campaign surrounding Russell Brand’s Recovery all received honourable mentions at the awards. A stylish campaign for Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles, led by Tara Al Azzawi of 4TH Estate Books (Harper Collins) gained a Highly Commended, while Paul Martinovic of Picador (Pan Mac) won the winner’s laurels for his carefully targeted digital marketing campaign for Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt.

Within the multi-title campaign category, Niriksha Bharadia’s campaign surrounding Agatha Christie (Faber & Faber) received an honourable mention, whilst Helen Flood and William Smith’s campaign for Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (Vintage, Penguin Random House) was Highly Commended. The winner within this category was Penguin Random House  Children’s Andrea Bowie, Sonia Razvi, Kitty Chivers and Roz Hutchinson, for their creative campaign involving a free online show for schools, Puffin Virtually Live: the Illustrators Takeover.

Highly Commended in the Children’s Category was Elisa Offord of Simon and Schuster’s campaign for Supertato: The Evil Pea Rules! by Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet, including a highly successful social media campaign and animated trailer. Emily Finn and Caroline Fleming of Egmont Publishing won the Children’s category for their fun instore campaign at HMV for Where’s the Wookie 2 from Lucasfilm.

The judges for the Autumn campaigns were: Julia Kingsford, Dominic Gettins, Keira O’Brien, Sarah Mulryan, James Spackman, Sam Missingham and joint BMS founders; Jo Henry & Alastair Giles.

Submissions for the next Award season — for campaigns between January and March — open on Tuesday 1 May. More info is available here.

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