The best of global digital marketing monthly awards for January 2015

The month was strongly dominated by European shows, most importantly Eurobest as the key marketing event in the region. We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of great work coming from France. It seems our judges agreed: voyages-snfc.com's Banner Contest for Psychopaths took the main prize.

Unlike the annual award shows, we select the fresh works every month. We select the works from the winners of local/regional award shows.

January 2015 winners

First Place: voyages-snfc.com's Banner Contest for Psychopaths by TBWA\Paris (France, Cristal Festival Awards 2014 winner)

Voyages-sncf.com is a subsidiary of the French SNCF and Expedia selling train tickets on European routes. In December, RailEurope.com changed to uk.voyage-sncf.com. The task was to drive traffic to the new site and raise awareness amongst UK travellers. TBWA\Paris came up with three special banners: the '24 hours banner', the '1,000,000 clicks banner' and the '587 miles scrolling banner'.

People were challenged to complete one of the banner marathons and grab a free train pass. Plenty of 'psychos' accepted the challenge. In the end, the final click rate was up to six times higher than the average rate in the UK. Seven players managed to finish one of the tasks.

Second Place: Finnish Tourist Board's Finngenerator by BYROO and SEK & GREY HELSINKI (Finland, Effie Finland winner)

Finngenerator's mission was to attract interest to Finland as a unique Nordic travel destination. The simple mobile optimised web tool allowed people to generate their personal Finnish name. The tool became super popular amongst procrastinators all over the world. Visitfinland.com received over 2.4 million unique visitors from 227 different countries and the number of visitors has stayed record high after the campaign.

Third Place: Kotak Mahindra Bank's World's First Twitter Banking (India, EMVIE Awards 2014 winner)

Since 2013, social media banking has been a huge focus for financial players. Kotak Mahindra Bank in India took a brave step forward and opened the first Twitter banking service in the world. It's called Jifi and has been rapidly growing its client base since launch in late spring 2014. This might be a ground-breaking initiative for the whole financial sector.

The jury consisted of Peter Roper (Editor at Marketing Mag Australia, Melbourne), Mike Berry (Internationally recognised digital marketing lecturer, trainer, author and consultant, UK), Hando Sinisalu (CEO of Best Marketing International, Estonia), Gamze Gurbuzatik (JWT International, Client Services Director Istanbul, Turkey), Misha Coetzee (Digital Brand Manager at Investec, South Africa) and Kusnadi Assaini (Head of Division at Digital One Jakarta, Indonesia).

To find out more about the awards visit www.best-marketing.eu/about-awards.