Airtel Nigeria, has won a total of 20 awards at the 2020 edition of the Lagos Advertising and Ideas Festival Awards (LAIF), a platform designed to recognize creative excellence as well as promote excellence in the field of advertising and marketing communications.
In what the award’s organizers have described as unprecedented, Airtel clinched seven Gold, six Silver, six Bronze and the most prestigious Grand Prix at the virtual ceremony, which held recently.
While Airtel won the Grand Prix with its ‘Data is Life’ advertising campaign, its ‘444’ campaign earned it three Gold awards in the Bank, Investment and other Financial Communication awards category and also three Gold in the Telecom Product/Services award category. Airtel’s ‘Data is Life’ campaign was also adjudged a Gold.
Airtel’s advertising campaign also won nine awards, earlier last year, at the Pitcher Awards, taking the company’s total awards for advertising campaigns in 2020 to 29, the most it has earned in any year.
The Pitcher Awards is widely considered as one of the most valuable and internationally respected accolades for creative work coming out of Africa. It started as an annual celebration of creativity in West Africa, but, beginning with the 2020 edition, the scope has widened to include all work created, released or implemented anywhere on the African continent in line with its vision to provide an authentic benchmark for African creative excellence.
CEO and managing director, Airtel Nigeria, Segun Ogunsanya, expressed appreciation to the awards organisers for celebrating and promoting excellence, while he dedicated the awards to the company’s over 50 million customers across Nigeria, noting that Airtel will not rest on its laurels and will continue to go the extra mile in connecting and bonding emotionally with all its stakeholders through compelling, relevant, bespoke and inspiring narratives.
Airtel Nigeria was recently recognised for its efforts in storytelling and PR innovation at the fifth edition of the Lagos Public Relations and Industry Gala (LaPRIGA), a prominent communications industry event at the instance of the Lagos State chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations.
The corporate communications department of Airtel Nigeria was also awarded the Best Corporate Communications Team in Africa prize by the prestigious Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Responsibility Awards (SERA). Ogunsanya was also recently named the Telecoms CEO of the Year, by telecoms stakeholders, under the banner of Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, while the company’s corporate communications/CSR director, Emeka Oparah and its information technology director, Seun Solanke, were named Corporate Communications Practitioner of the Year and IT Director of the Year by LaPRIGA and the CIO Awards, respectively.