November 16th, 2017

Awards Season Ends With Another 2 Trophies!

Last week saw Catapult PR attending the last of three award ceremonies in the space of eight days – the CIM Northern Awards – which were staged in the amazing ‘Monastery’ in Gorton, Manchester.

Amazingly, we’ve survived, although the back-to-back Northern Marketing Awards & CIPR PRide Awards segue was challenging, especially as the previous night had been spent trying to get out of a car park at Old Trafford for 90 minutes and not getting back to base until after midnight!  The cancellation of our 2-night Airbnb stay was not helpful, but at least the night porter at the Premier Inn has now seen us walk back in with three different types of award on three different nights!

A blue glow spilled out of the windows of the gothic ‘Monastery’ as the taxi drew up and we headed inside to discover the results in five award categories in which we were nominated.  By accident, as the fizz flowed at the pre-awards drinks, we bumped into someone who had judged our B2C category and, on discovering who was who, she declared that she’d read our entry and thought, “where on earth did they find all the energy?”  That was rather pleasing.

As it turned out, as we rubbed shoulders with the likes of Newcastle Airport, Northumbria Water, the Jorvik visitor attraction, more Scandinavians in the form of Widnes Vikings and some lovely people from the SPA Professional Academy, we won the B2C category.  Later into the evening, Catapult’s MD, Jane Hunt, scooped the Best Consultant accolade – a feat she had also achieved at the CIPR PRide Awards a week earlier.

As a result, this little Lancashire PR and marketing agency is now in possession of two incredibly heavy CIM Northern Awards that Jane is threatening to use as weights should an exercise urge overcome her in the office!  Together, these blue beauties make quite a pretty display with the rest of our 8-day haul – two pink CIPR PRide Awards (Best Community Relations campaign and Best Consultant) and our purple-pink Northern Marketing Award (Best Tourism and Leisure Campaign).

We, of course, have also clocked up a further 10 finalist accolades so far in 2017 and were the only agency in the north to be shortlisted across the three most prestigious awards schemes in the world of PR and marketing.

Thanks to contacts we made at these award ceremonies, Jane is to now contribute some articles to the Institute of Professional Marketing’s communications newsletters and we have potentially sourced sponsors for Northumberland Day 2018.  Jane hooked up with her former account execs Nina and Laura again at the CIPR PRide Awards, not to mention former workmates, Simon and Libby.  She has also rediscovered a photographer we used to work with back in the day and has potentially sourced her next training course, as well as having a few future lunch dates in the diary.

We did also meet a Daniel Craig lookalike and a 17-year-old digital whizz-kid thanks to this awards round and Jane was pictured with a Widnes Viking, causing her to recall how she’s supposed to have Viking blood, if the vein in the wrist test is anything to go by.  What more could you want?

We did consider – and we never do this – entering our local business awards, but rejected that on good grounds and so are hard back at word racking up the results on current campaigns.  We’ve also started working with some brilliant businesses – Wild Dog Outdoors, The Used Kitchen Company, Graham & Partners in Denmark, are about to start working with a Harrogate agency on the content marketing and copywriting side (well, we work very well together for an existing Yorkshire PR client) and have three other great possibilities bubbling along.  The new business campaign hasn’t even started yet!
The reaction to our awards success has been amazing this year. Our web traffic has soared, our LinkedIn posts have been seen by a fair few folk, we’ve had emails from all sorts of interesting people and our stock has gone up, as they say.  That was another major aim of the year.

The irony is that we started 2017 not quite liking the fact that we had 24 awards in the trophy cabinet, as we thought 25 a much rounder and more cuddly figure.  We’ve now got 29!  Onwards and upwards in the quest for 30 then!