2020 PM Society Digital Awards - Winners Announced

ARK and Syneos Health Communications top the agency charts

The Digital Awards is in its 11th year and celebrates the best in digital communications within the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. Judges include experts from digital, creative and communications agencies, digital specialists and marketers from industry as well as healthcare professionals.

This year, the event was held online for the first time, due to the pandemic. Over 700 e-tickets were issued for the show which was aired in two parts, on the 16th and 17th September, and with teams watching together on Zoom the total audience was estimated at well over 1000. The shows kicked off with comedy sets by Russell Kane, an awards ceremony favourite, and Alan Dedicoat performed the role of host. With sponsorsunable to hand out awards on stage, each sponsor company showed a short video advert and a sponsor representative introduced the categories as well as opening the gold envelopes from the comfort of their own homes. The pre-recorded show was accompanied by a live social media wall which was full of photos of teams watching and celebrating from their offices and homes around the world.

There was an even spread of winners across the categories, echoing the trend of the last three years, with no one agency or client company taking home more than two Golds. There were three new categories this year – ‘Lockdown engagement’ for companies that had used digital innovation to keep their teams motivated during lockdown; a ‘Still working!’ category to highlight the best digital programmes delivering consistent results after 3 years and ‘Global to local’, which looked at programmes where adaptation or localisation was a key feature.

The ‘Pharma Digital Partner’ this year was Donna Roberts from Takeda with a Highly Commended award for Paul Dixey from Novartis. ‘Digital Project or Account Manager’ was won by Radical Departures’ Genevieve Morgan and ‘Agency Digital Team’ was won by ARK for the second year running, with Mole Digital awarded Highly Commended.

This year two agencies stood out at the top of the field with two Golds each; ARK won a Gold in the ‘Healthcare Charities’ category as well as taking home the ‘Agency Digital Team’ award plus a Silver and a Bronze; Syneos Health Communications also won two Golds, one for ‘Innovation – new technology’, for their work with Edwards Lifesciences and another in the ‘Still Working!’ category for AbbVie.

Other agency Gold winners were Boxbear, Cognitant, Engage in-Health, Mole Digital, Page & Page, PharmaDoctor, Radical Departures, Salt, W20 Group and woolley pau.

Among pharma companies and healthcare organisations, no single company took more than one Gold but there were several companies that took multiple awards. Top of the pharma leader board were AstraZeneca and Napp, both taking a Gold and 2 Silvers. Other Gold winners were Abbvie, Align Technology, Bayer, Chiesi, Edwards Lifesciences, Essity, Ipsen, Novartis, Takeda and UCB. There were also wins for two charity organisations – Monkey Sox and Niemann-Pick UK with Niemann-Pick taking a Silver as well.

Chair of the Digital Awards, Rachel Farrow, said

“Moving the Digital Awards online this year was a lot of work – probably twice as much as a live event! We had launched the awards before lockdown so things started out as in previous years with good numbers of entries and first round judging online but we decided to move the second round judging online due to restrictions about meeting in person. This took place over three days of Zoom calls with agencies presenting to panels of judges in exactly the same way they would have done at the Crowne Plaza. I’d like to thank all the judges for being so adaptable and some people even preferred it, with a lot less travelling and time out of the office required.

We decided to put together the show in two parts, to make it as watchable as possible and the sponsors all had a lot of exposure, including video adverts. Of course, we all missed meeting up in person and networking with colleagues and clients, but feedback has been fantastic from both sponsors and attendees alike. Let’s hope we can hold the event in person in 2021!””

Full list of Gold winners

The PM Society

The PM Society is a not-for-profit organisation, which was founded over 40 years ago. Today it has over 4000 active members from over 250 companies and has three aims – to support organisations and people in healthcare, to recognise excellence and promote best practice and to provide education and training.

For more information see our website at www.pmsociety.org.uk