WFA President’s Awards recognise exceptional industry initiatives around the world

WFA President and Mastercard CMCO Raja Rajamannar has recognised the achievements of six key industry initiatives around the world as well as handing out one special award.

Launched in 2010, the annual President’s Awards recognise initiatives run by national industry associations that have helped advance the marketer’s agenda and contribute to positive change in the marketing industry and society. Submissions were judged on being able to compellingly demonstrate that they had made a measurable impact in the last year, against the backdrop of the pandemic.

This year’s winners were selected from 25 initiatives submitted by 15 associations from WFA’s sixty strong membership of national industry associations on six continents.

The winners are:

Union des marques (France): Le Référentiel – The Effectiveness Measurement Repository Platform. “Le Référentiel” is a first-of-its-kind repository to guide brands and their partners in assessing the relevance and effectiveness of their marcomms. It gives access to a set of well-structured and clearly defined KPIs for measuring effectiveness. Union des marques also developed an “Efficiency Visa” which certifies the quality of existing measurement and research methodologies.

JAA (Japan): Establishing UN Women’s Unstereotype Alliance Japan chapter. JAA is a founding member of the Unstereotype Alliance Japan chapter launched in May 2020. With gender and diversity as a priority, the association co-created the Nikkei Women Empowerment Awards, launched a Diversity Committee within JAA membership and organised educational activities. In September 2020, JAA also unveiled a roadmap encouraging the use of subtitled TV ads to make advertising more accessible to people with a hearing impairment.

ANFO (Norway): MarTech Stack-check. With advertisers spending more on martech than ever before, ANFO launched new services in 2020 to help their members navigate this space. This includes a “MarTech Stack-check” which offers objective and unbiased martech advice from ANFO’s in-house experts, an information hub on everything martech, and an academy which helped advertisers build their martech strategy, strengthen their in-house capabilities and optimise their work processes.

RVD (Turkey): “When ads change, society changes” campaign. According to RVD’s annual research on Effie award-winning TV ads in Turkey, the country’s ad industry is falling behind in terms of gender equality. To address this, the association launched “When ads change, society changes” in 2020 - an OOH, radio and online campaign to spread awareness on the lack of diversity in Turkish advertising and draw industry and public support towards promoting gender equality.

ISBA (UK): Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study. Released in May 2020, ISBA’s programmatic study, in association with the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and carried out by PwC, sought to illuminate and map out the process by which advertisers and publishers are served by the programmatic system in the UK. This is the world’s first study that went beyond buy-side data and used data science techniques to match and map impressions and supply chains from end-to-end. ISBA also founded an industry-wide taskforce to carry forward recommendations from the study.

ANA (US): Supplier Diversity. ANA released a report in May 2020 which found that finding diverse suppliers - women-owned, ethnic/minority-owned, veteran-owned, LGBTQ-owned, disability-owned and small businesses - is a big challenge for marketers. The association then published an open letter in June 2020 calling for the development of an equitable creative supply chain, and committed to curating a regularly updated list of diverse suppliers working in the US ad industry.

CAP in Paraguay was also recognised with a special award due to the importance and impact their initiative had in the local context. The association’s “Elegí marcas legales” nationwide campaign highlighted the value of buying products from legally recognised brands and addressed the huge problem of contraband and counterfeit products increasingly being smuggled into the country.

“The calibre of this year’s submissions just goes to show the extent and scale of brilliant initiatives being led by national advertiser associations around the world in support of marketers during the pandemic. My heartfelt thanks and congratulations to the teams behind these winning initiatives; you have truly been at the forefront of driving positive change at one of the most difficult times to be in business”, said Raja Rajamannar, WFA President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mastercard.

WFA President’s Awards 2021 is supported by Infectious Media, now part of Kepler Group.

“We're very proud to support the WFA President’s Awards this year. It’s great to see how many of the winning initiatives go beyond improving effectiveness to show how advertising can be a broader force for good and have a positive impact on society,” said Martin Kelly, CEO & Co-founder of Infectious Media.