Campaigns for Dawkins, Porter and Packham win BMS summer awards

Campaigns for Richard Dawkins, Max Porter and Chris Packham are among the winners of the Book Marketing Society awards for the May-August 2016 season.

Claudia Toia of Penguin won the Award for Best Multi-Title Campaign for three of Richard Dawkins’ backlist titles, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow. They were published with new cover designs, based on an algorithm Dawkins wrote three decades ago to simulate evolution.

Katie Hall of Faber & Faber won the Best Adult Fiction campaign award for Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which included a billboard in Shoreditch of a crow with real feathers.
 
The Best Adult Non-Fiction campaign award, meanwhile, was won by Caroline Butler of Ebury for the “skilfully conducted” social media campaign promoting Chris Packham’s Fingers in the Sparkle Jar.
 
Best Children’s Marketing campaign award went to Naomi Berwin of Hodder & Stoughton for YouTuber Oli White’s Generation Next. For the author’s 21st birthday, 2,100 signed copies were released.

Faber & Faber also won the Best Shoestring campaign Award for Tim Burgess’ Tim Book Two. Marketer Lindsay Terrell was praised for “leveraging some perfect partnerships and social listening tools to create a very effective campaign” on a budget under £2,500.
 
Campaigns that were highly commended included Love You Dead by Sarah Arratoon of Pan Macmillan, Penguin’s multi-title (hashtag) ByBook campaign by Caroline Maddison and Claire Wilshaw, and Helen Callaghan’s Dear Amy campaign by Beth Cockeram and Claire Bush of Michael Joseph.
 
The May-August BMS awards are part of three seasons of awards it runs each year to celebrate the industry’s best marketing campaigns.