MACE receives Best Integrated Media Campaign Award
BWG Foods and its MACE retail brand have received national recognition at the highly prestigious Eir Spider Awards which took place in the RDS recently, taking home the Best Innovation and Best Integrated Media Campaign awards respectively.
Fighting off competition from AIB amongst others in a category which sought creative, efficient and performance-based innovations, BWG Foods received the Best Innovation award for its highly innovative Shoplink App; a feature rich e-commerce solution which brings the best of B2C technology to a B2B platform. Developed in conjunction with BWG Foods’ digital partner, Tribe Digital, ShopLink is a sleek, responsive and high-performance application that has quickly become the Group’s core stock ordering system.
The ShopLink platform has transformed the ordering process for BWG Foods’ retail network of over 1,000 SPAR, EUROSPAR, Londis, MACE, and XL stores, and is expected to transact over €1 billion in revenue in 2019.
Commenting on the award win, Chris Donnelly, IT Director, BWG Foods said, “We’re delighted to have received this Spider award in such a competitive category, recognising what we believe is a truly best-in-class digital solution. Our strategy of leveraging the best of B2C technology in a B2B environment means at its core, we have a market leading solution whereby our retailers can review our full product range and place orders using the latest mobile technologies, anywhere, anytime, with the support of sophisticated category management services. We’ve also integrated additional features which ensure less effort, but greater accuracy for our retailers in terms of stock management.”
Separately, MACE took home the Best Integrated Media Campaign Award against competition from Heineken Ireland, Today FM and eFlow. The award, which seeks to showcase innovative, creative and emotive campaigns that drive consumer behaviour recognised MACE’s recent Extra Smile campaign which featured Johnny Sexton as brand ambassador and was underpinned by a series of nationwide community initiatives, advertising and social media activations.
Commenting on the award win, Suzanne Weldon, Marketing and Communications Director, BWG Foods said, “We’re extremely proud of this award win and indeed our MACE Extra Smile marketing campaign fronted by Johnny Sexton. We invested significantly in creating a campaign and a supporting activation strategy that would penetrate deeply, using various communications platforms, with our diverse community of customers across Ireland, and it’s been a huge success.”
BWG Foods were also finalists in the Best Use of Disruptive Technologies category at the Eir Spider Awards.
BWG Foods’ ShopLink platform was also recognised internationally recently where BWG Foods was awarded SPAR International’s Retail Systems & Technology Excellence Award, at an award ceremony that took place in China. BWG Foods was up against fierce competition from SPAR International partners across 45 countries, representing over 13,000 stores globally.
Every year the most important figures in online and digital media gather for the Eir Spider Awards, ‘The Oscars’ of their industry. Established in 1996, the Eir Spider Awards are now in their 22nd year making them the longest standing and most prestigious digital awards in Ireland.
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