Asked to name their favourite campaign of the past year, 31 GPB entrants went for the multi-award-winning #LikeAGirl, which focuses on increasing self-esteem among women.
Many of the 180-or-so campaigns chosen by the GPB elite were cause-driven, and several garnered multiple entries.
Female empowerment was again the theme in the joint second most popular choice: Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign. It gathered nine votes, as did Missing Type, the MHP-assisted campaign for the UK’s National Blood Week that saw the letters A, O and B go 'missing' from London street signs, shop fronts and the front page of the Daily Mirror to encourage blood donations.
Dove’s Choose Beautiful/Real Beauty campaign – again focused on female self-esteem – gathered support of seven GPB members. Many favoured campaigns where brands associate themselves to specific causes in an authentic way, such as Save the Bees from Honey Nut Cheerios; Stellar Artois and Water.org’s Buy a Lady a Drink campaign to publicise the global water crisis; and Coca-Cola’s Labels are for Cans, Not for People in the Middle East to fight prejudice.
With the American primaries continuing to dominate headlines in the US, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign was the runaway winner among the presidential contenders, with eight votes. Bernie Sanders’ campaign won support of two GPB members – twice as many as his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.
Of Trump’s campaign, Saxum CEO Renzi Stone said: "He has leveraged earned and social media in a way that I did not think was possible. He took the theory of ‘all press is good press’ to another level."
Special mention goes to activities around the release of the latest instalment of the Star Wars saga – five GPB members chose it as their top campaign.
Q: What is your favourite comms campaign of the past year (not one of your own)?
1) Always #LikeAGirl (31 votes)
2) = Sport England’s This Girl Can; NHS Blood and Transplant’s Missing Type (9)
3) Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign (8)
4) = Dove Choose Beautiful/Real Beauty; VisitBritain Great Chinese Names for Great Britain (7)
5) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (5)
You can check out 350 profiles of global PR superstars in PRWeek’s 2016 Global Power Book.
