Zenith wins Media Week Awards’ Agency of the Year during first day of the two-day online awards show for 2020
Other winners include: Publicis Groupe media agency won Media Leader of the Year prize, which went to chief executive Natalie Cummins.
Zenith was chosen by the judges as the year’s best agency for delivering compelling client work, an “unparalleled year of new business wins”, and meaningful efforts to improve its diversity and inclusion. Even with the impact of the pandemic, Zenith increase its billings in early 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. In the second half of 2019, the agency brought in an impressive amount of new billings from brands such as Disney, Three Mobile, Macmillan, RBS Ventures, 888 Bingo and Eurowings, with no losses, and also grew like-for-like revenue.
Cummins, who joined the agency more than twenty year ago as a graduate, was awarded Media Leader of the Year, a unique category that is informed by a public vote and decided by a panel of industry leaders.
The judges were also taken by her partnership-led approach with clients, she reduced or deferred fees for more vulnerable clients in return for new (often Covid-19-driven) assignments.
Manning Gottlieb OMD was awarded Best Agency Partner, a special award from Reach Solutions that is drawn from a vote of media owners. The Omnicom agency also won Gold in the Best Use of Data for Audience Buying category.
PHD, Goodstuff Commuications, and OMD UK were the most-awarded winners for top prizes across individual categories today, with each agency scoring two Gold awards apiece.
Due to social-distancing measures, 2020 winners of the awards are being announced in a digital ceremony taking place over two days. The second half of the announcements will be unveiled on mediaweekawards.co.uk at 4.30pm on Thursday (15 October).
Each category is judged by senior leaders and rising stars from across the UK commercial media industry as Campaign invited all the winners of this year’s Media Week 30 Under 30 talent contest to be judges.
The judging panel was co-chaired by Kate Waters, director of client strategy and planning at ITV, and Matt Adams, global managing director of Brainlabs.
