September 19th, 2024
6 Shortlistings: a Powerful Travel and Insurance PR Story
Catapult PR has once again pulled out all the stops with its exciting client campaigns in the year August 2023 to August 2024, enabling its results to shine and to wow judges of the Prolific North Marketing Awards 2024.
In a year in which the Chartered Institute of Public Relations suddenly announced it would not be running its regional PR awards programme, we this year found ourselves having to put our work up against the biggest marketing agencies across the north, if we wanted to receive any independent endorsement for it.
That can be a very different thing from competing with PR agency peers, so we are delighted by the news today, which outlined that Catapult has been shortlisted for an incredible six awards.
The names we are up against are again huge and will be operating, in the main, with extremely large budgets. To get this far and be one of the agencies with the largest number of shortlistings is just amazing. Need we say it again, size isn’t everything!
Our travel PR and insurance PR award shortlistings
We are shortlisted for two different campaigns and have a shortlisting that recognises our impact as an agency and an entity in its own right. That is again something refreshing, as the Prolific North Marketing Awards have introduced a new size category this year, so ‘small’ is not classed as an agency that actually has quite a few names on the payroll. Now, ‘small’ is defined in a sensible way.
We are shortlisted in the Prolific North Marketing Awards 2024 for:
– Best Small Agency
– Best B2B PR Campaign
– Best B2C PR Campaign
– Best Tourism & Leisure Campaign
– Best Professional & Financial Services Campaign
– Best Small Budget PR Campaign
This is quite a spread but it couldn’t be better. It explains so much about us; specialists in some core sectors, experts at exacting maximum value from a marketing budget and just as proficient at B2B PR, content writing and marketing as at B2C.
We did, of course, win the Small Budget campaign award at last year’s awards
Historic house and insurance broker marketing
The campaign awards have partly been achieved in the field of heritage tourism, on behalf of a historic house and gardens, underlining our travel PR credentials and right to regard ourselves as one of the most successful travel PR agencies.
We love working on marketing campaigns for stately homes and in the heritage sector, as a lot of marketing in this field is rather ‘as expected’ and we feel it gives scope for Catapult PR’s ideas to shine.
The other PR campaign awards are in the insurance sector, where we have our motto for financial services PR campaigns, ‘banishing the grey’. Being shortlisted for an insurance marketing award is very apt, given that we have a heritage, as an insurance PR agency, which stretches back to our foundation in 1998 and actually way back to an in-house insurance PR role with Swinton Insurance. It proves our heritage is a living concept. We were winning awards for insurance PR back in 1999. We’re still winning them now.
Undoubtedly, as a PR agency for insurance companies and brokers, we continue to bring fresh thinking to insurance marketing campaigns and phenomenal levels of thought leadership to our financial services PR work. To have clients in this sector say it was a very good day when we started to work with them is truly rewarding. We have helped shape their destinies, fuelled their growth and made them true thought leaders.
Made in Lancashire PR and content for Yorkshire and Cumbrian clients
It is also worth noting that we may be a Lancashire PR agency but these campaigns were for clients in Cumbria and Yorkshire, counties where we work with many clients who really want to make a noise and generate results for their marketing, PR and content.
It also has to be said that we love the Prolific North Marketing Awards, as they are typically held in one of our ‘spiritual homes’, either Manchester United’s Old Trafford Alex Ferguson suite or Lancashire County Cricket Club’s corporate hospitality facilities. We love either of these venues, with both being our ‘happy places’ – but then, we are sports mad!
This year’s awards take place on Halloween. Given the size of the competitors we are up against, we would be spooked if we won, but we channelled our inner Axl Rose last year and came home with a trophy, albeit one we didn’t expect to win. And we mainly entered the CIPR NW PRide Awards last autumn, which, as pointed out, are not operating this year. We won big at last years.
An enormous amount of creativity, hard work and blood, sweat and tears has gone into these campaigns and it’s always nice to have a little treat as a reward, whenever everything comes good, as it has today. Even if we don’t win, we’ve put down another marker and demonstrated the quality of our work in both travel PR and insurance PR (and wider financial services PR). So, maybe that rather nice third shirt that Man Utd have launched this season would be suitable reward.
