Image supplied. Promise agency was named best digital agency at the 2023 IAB Bookmark Awards

PPS won Best Digital Brand, with its agency Promise winning Best Digital Agency, while its campaign Finding the Forgotten Graduate won a Black Pixel for Pixel for Purpose as well as five golds, four silvers and a bronze.

Katlego Moutlana chief strategy officer and partner in the business, Promise says the brand and the agency had put a lot of work and effort into the campaign. “We knew it was a wonderful piece of work, but still, when you get acknowledgment from the industry there is nothing like it.”

Shared success

While the campaign is beautifully crafted, she says it is a very important campaign. “It is telling a story that has never been told in South Africa; it is different voices that have not been expressed or told.”

She explains that PPS is a brand that is all about shared success and celebrating graduate professionals. “The point is that graduate professionals of colour have always existed in our history, and the brand took it upon itself to tell the stories of these graduate professionals and recognise and acknowledge them.”

The campaign took months but everyone was passionate about making it happen. “We asked ourselves how we can make today’s graduate professionals, who are younger and Black, resonate with an established insurance brand?”

Moutlana says the insight is shared success. “Shared success is very South African. It speaks to Ubuntu. PPS was founded by people who wanted to benefit not just themselves but their families and communities as well as society, and this is still so today.”

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Reaching a new audience

Accenture Song’s LI:FE of Confidence campaign for Sanlam also took months to put together. “It was possibly 18 months of work from pitching the idea to actually making it,” says Danni Pinch, executive creative director at Accenture Song.

The campaign won three golds, six silvers and three bronze pixels.

“As the campaign developed we were using the latest technology to do it. And then it just existed across so many different platforms, from influencer content to the website to social media. It had a lot of legs.”

Nimay Parekh, director at Accenture Song adds that with such a cluttered environment out there, brands need to find ways to break out and stand out.

“The channels we used were relevant to reach an audience who normally would not interact with Sanlam and presented them with something trendy and topical on channels that allowed the brand to engage with an audience who would normally not engage with the brand,” adds Nimay.