2010 RMAs: Army gets the winning habit
Thursday, 8 July 2010The Army and its agency Skive were the big winners at the 30th anniversary CIPD Recruitment Marketing Awards, held on the evening of Wednesday 7th July at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London's Covent Garden.
They took no less than four of the thirteen available category awards - for website, digital recruitment, campaign of the year and recruitment effectiveness - plus the coveted Grand Prix, recognising the best work of the year, for their ‘Start thinking soldier' campaign.
The only other agencies to win more than one award were TCS, who claimed the inaugural ‘agency of the year' award in addition to the art direction prize for Orange, and andsome, who picked up a brace for the flavoursome duo of Nando's (candidate experience) and Zizzi (employer brand). That left a further half-dozen agencies with a single category award apiece.
The full list of category winners, in order of presentation, is: art direction - TCS/Orange (for UFO overlay); recruitment website - Skive/The Army (with TCS/Aviva highly commended); candidate experience - andsome/Nando's; press ad (the most hotly contested category, with the highest number of entries) - Wave/Blandford Sub Aqua; digital recruitment - Skive/The Army; internal recruitment comms - JWT Inside/Kraft Foods; graduate recruitment - Stafford Long/Barclays Capital (with TMP Worldwide/National Audit Office highly commended); copywriting - aia/Qinetiq; campaign of the year - Skive/The Army; employer brand - andsome/Zizzi; outdoor recruitment - Bernard Hodes/Hertfordshire Constabulary; recruitment effectiveness: Skive/The Army; diversity - TMP Worldwide/NHS.
Understandably, the shortlist for the new ‘agency of the year' category consisted mainly of established players rather than newcomers. FT Recruitment Solutions' MD Steve Playford noted that all the shortlisted candidates - which included aia, Alexander Mann Solutions, Bernard Hodes, TMP Worldwide, Tribal and Wave - had been strong contenders before presenting the award to TCS.
In her welcoming address, CIPD chief executive Jackie Orme pointed out that the awards' thirtieth-anniversary year had been one of the toughest years ever, if not the toughest, and that the quality of the entries was a testimony to the tenacity and determination of the industry. (Or, as compère Rufus Hound put it later, "You people are doing something wonderful - you've taken something that nobody needs, and made it exciting.")
Once again, the night's big winner was a consumer agency rather than a recruitment specialist and therefore isn't listed in the new PM Guide to Recruitment Marketing, published to coincide with the awards. And although the 2010 RMAs were distributed between nine different agencies, more than half of the top ten in the Guide's new league table - including some well-known names, of course - failed to pick up a single trophy.
Ri5 adds its congratulations to the winners and, as usual, commiserations to the shortlisted agencies and other entrants. Congratulations should also go to the CIPD's new awards partner, Redactive's People Management, and headline sponsor exec-appointments.com for devising an excellent event in a first-class venue.
