Atmosphere takes overall PRISA Gold

This year saw a record 86 entries received for the PRISM Awards. The judges awarded 14 gold awards, 15 silver awards and nine bronze awards in 27 categories, assessing entries assessed according to five key criteria: statement of the problem or opportunity, research, planning, execution and evaluation.

Atmosphere Communications' campaign will be submitted to the international IPRA (International Public Relations Association) Golden Awards. The project also received the Jenna Clifford Trophy.

Winners in all categories for the 2009 PRISM Awards were as follows:

Atmosphere Communications had to reposition SIM, South Africa's second largest insurance brand, and ensure that it remains relevant to the ever-changing financial services industry. It overcame the challenge by positioning Sanlam as a full service financial company and SIM as an individual brand.

The highly focused strategic media relations campaign aligned communications to business objectives and increased market share, successfully repositioning SIM as a leading player in the investment industry and enabling a new corporate reputation to be built within Sanlam and with retail clients.

Atmosphere Communications decided to focus the campaign on four distinctive elements: bread-and-butter public relations (which looked at media training, media collateral, pen portraits and media offices with ongoing media releases, interviews, features and surveys); thought leadership (opinion pieces and proactive issues commentary); spokesperson profiling (in which media meetings, a media contact book and story placements were the main focus); and high visibility platforms (focused on thought leadership events and indexes).

This approach was very successful with media results totalling 350 pieces of on-message media coverage totalling R 5 609 741.