President’s Pick: Kat Thomas, PR Lions

Recruitment initiatives tend to skew rational and functional, so this 50th-anniversary campaign from Popeyes applies creativity to something that typically sits in the ‘corporate comms’ lane. It highlights a significant social issue – the employability of people over 50 – but with a tonal playfulness that feels credible for the brand.

I’ve worked with destination marketers for nearly two decades now, and while travel is a wonderful category, stakeholders are often either government departments or their affiliates. This makes creative bravery so much harder to realise: it doesn’t get much braver than launching a destination on OnlyFans. I applaud absolutely everyone involved in making this brilliant, impactful campaign.

This is a world-class example of taking a genuine, consumer-behaviour-based insight and committing to it creatively. Its simplicity is its genius. Of course it’s madness that sausages come in packs of eight while the buns come in packs of 10! Heinz took something in the public consciousness and built a fun, engaging, participatory campaign that it totally owned.

While the creative idea for an arguably tough brief is outstanding, I was equally blown away by the execution and specifically the scale of the impact of the earned-led media strategy. I imagine it was a complex brief – one that involved awareness, education and the need to shift perceptions. It set out to make cultured meat a mainstream topic, and it achieved that and more with this memorable, provocative campaign.

Purposeful campaigns need to be authentic – they can’t feel forced or leave people confused by the connection between the brand and the cause. This initiative from Pepco, a retailer popular for school uniforms and equipment, chose to drive awareness of Romania’s growing youth illiteracy issues. The team launched this campaign with bravery that’s unusual for the sector and reaped the benefits as a result.