After I failed to win a college creative writing contest in 1979 and groused about it, one of my advisors, the late John Hersey, told me words to the effect that “Homer didn’t win squat for the Odyssey.” True that, but Hersey did win a Pulitzer (I was part of a team that got nominated for one….)
I still like to brag and today I get to brag on behalf of the digital media team here at Lenovo who delivered the goods in a big way in 2008 for our Olympic sponsorship with Voices of the Summer Games. We’ve won two big awards in the public relations world for our work – thanks to the diligent applications of our agency, Ogilvy PR’s 360 Digital Influence team of John Bell, Rohit Bhargava, and Kaitlyn Wilkins – the Catchup Lady.
The first award is the Holmes Report Golden Saber . This, to PR people, is a really big deal. And we won the Global Program category with our athlete blogger program – 100 athletes, 25 countries, telling the world about their experiences in Beijing on Lenovo IdeaPads. Simple idea, massive execution project, and it came off flawlessly (well, almost). So, I have a Saber going for me. Here’s Rohit picking up the hardware.
The second award got announced last week, a Bronze Anvil from the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America). We won the Social Media category.
The people at Lenovo who need to take bows are:
- Deepak Advani
- Esteban Panzeri
- Alan White
- Tim Supples
- Bob Page
- Kim Preslar
- Jim Hazen
- Geraldine Kan
- David Rabin
- Carina Van Vlerken
- Margaret Lam
- Sheji Ho
- Kevin Walker
-
Mike Cunningham
Supporting us:
- The aforementioned Ogilvy folks
- Neo@Ogilvy for driving a remarkable media plan (Nicole Estebanell and team)
- Tom Lowry and the Google team that let us borrow their portal and blogging
- Federated Media – John Battelle, when I first briefed him, was negative and persuaded me it would wither in the noise if we didn’t do something smart. Federated delivered that)
Cue up the music, escort the man in the tux away from the microphone, cut to commercial ….