There’s just over a week left to enter your agency, company or organisation into the Northern Digital Awards, which will return in January.
The event, which will be held on Thursday 28th January 2016 in association with Don’t Panic Event Management and Prolific North, will once again be held at the New Dock Hall at Royal Armouries in Leeds.
Entries are open across 20 categories – plus a Grand Prix award – spanning key professional specialisms of the buoyant digital industries across the region. The closing date for entries is Friday November 6th, with the shortlist announced in December. Here’s the direct link to the entry form.
If your company has a headquarters anywhere from North Wales to the North East, this is the awards ceremony to recognise your digital achievements.
The awards will once again recognise the very best in digital campaigns, e-tailing, apps, video and, most importantly, the talent in the North, as well as rewarding websites across a number of sectors.
This year’s inaugural event, the first time we had hosted a major event in Yorkshire, attracted a sell-out crowd of over 400. You can read a review and view pictures of the night here, and see all the winners here.
Last week saw another hugely successful running of its sister event, the Northern Marketing Awards, which attracted a sell-out crowd of over 400 to the Hilton in Manchester.
Judging
We have brought together an esteemed panel of industry leaders and experts, to help us ensure the whole process is managed and ultimately decided upon with the greatest possible degree of digital expertise and professionalism. The judging is a rigorous two stage process including pre-scoring to determine shortlists and a judging meeting where entries are discussed and evaluated in detail to decide the winning entries. The full list of judges and their biogs can be found below.
Get involved
It’s time to get your entries in now – deadlines can be found here – plus there are number of sponsorship opportunities available for the Northern Digital Awards which are limited and we do expect them to prove popular so if you would like to get involved call Nicky Wake at Don’t Panic Projects on 01706 828855 or e-mail nicky@dontpanicprojects.com or contact Nick Jaspan at Prolific North on 07788 417660 or email nick@prolificnorth.co.uk
Further information including entry forms are available the Northern Digital Awards website.
Meet the judges
Andy Barke, Industry Head, Google UK
Andy is responsible for building and retaining agency relationships in the North and Scotland and is now established as the search giant’s most well-known face outside the capital.
Ben Bisco, Head of Digital, JD Williams
An experienced online marketer providing cutting edge digital marketing campaigns across a variety of disciplines and markets. Having cut his teeth in a specialist search agency, Ben joined Brilliant Media to set up a search offering from scratch. In only a few years he grew the department from a handful of campaigns to be one of the largest in the UK. A move to digital specialist hômejames gave him the chance to get stuck in to multi-channel work and he was instrumental in developing a full service offering for the agency, before his move to JD Williams.
Martin Bryant, Editor-in-Chief, The Next Web
The Next Web, a global technology news website. Based in Manchester, he is also part of the founding team behind SpaceportX, a workspace and events venue for tech entrepreneurs and startups. He is a member of Manchester Digital‘s council and regularly discusses technology on the BBC and Sky News.
Tom Cheesewright, Founder of applied futurism practice Book of the Future
Tom Cheesewright is the founder of applied futurism practice Book of the Future, helping organisations to see, share and respond to a coherent vision of tomorrow. Tom followed a degree in Mechatronic Engineering with 14 years in the tech industry, working with global brands such as BT, EE and IBM, and subsequently founded a series of technology-driven companies. Most recently he co-founded venture-backed big data analytics start-up CANDDi, of which he remains a shareholder.
Mike Deyes, Head of Digital Communications at the University of Liverpool and a Chartered Marketer
Mike joined the University in 2008 from Manchester Metropolitan University where he was the Internet manager, responsible for all digital activity. Prior to joining MMU, Mike spent a number of years at two national charities working on award winning fundraising and media relation campaigns.
David Edmundson-Bird, Principal Lecturer, Digital Marketing and Enterprise, MMU Business School
David Edmundson-Bird is a proper old-school dot-com casualty from 2001. Currently Principal Lecturer in Digital Marketing Communications and Director of the Econsultancy Masters Programme at MMU Business School, David is also the founder of MMU Agency Life. He has enjoyed several spells in UK academic institutions as well as senior management and non-executive roles in the private digital media sector.
Paul Fabretti, Digital and Social Media Lead, Telefónica
Paul’s role is to define and deliver the social media vision for Telefonica and ensure their local businesses remain an example of social media best-practice.
Prior to this, he was Head of Social Media for the award-winning Telefonica UK (O2) social media team, which won the inaugural Twitter Flock award for outstanding use of the Twitter platform and recently launched Tweetserve the world’s first Twitter-based account management platform.
Richard Gregory, UK Industry Expert
A co-founder of the SAScon conference, Richard held a number of senior roles at Latitude before becoming its managing director in 2012. He now works as a consultant and was recently elected to the Manchester Digital council.
Herb Kim, Founder, The Thinking Digital conference
Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Herb is best known as Founder of the long-running Thinking Digital Conference. The 8th Annual Thinking Digital Conference takes place in May 2015. In addition to Thinking Digital, Herb is the founder of the TEDxLiverpool, TEDxManchester, TEDxSheffield and TEDxNewcastle. He is a Board Director for Tech City UK and an advisory board member for branded content agency Captive Minds in London.
Steve Kuncewicz, Head of IP & Media – Associate, Bermans
Steve’s main areas of expertise are issues involving music, film, television, copyright, trade marks, broadcasting, domain names, confidential information, moral rights, advertising and marketing, passing off, libel, slander, malicious falsehood, breach of data protection and breach of privacy. He is a leading individual in the legal social media community and Manchester’s most followed lawyer on Twitter.
Katrina Michel, Marketing Cheshire
Katrina is CEO of Marketing Cheshire. Before that she worked for a number of communications agencies such as Ogilvy and JWT and was co-owner of local communications planning consultancy Planning Express for 3 years. She has won 5 IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards.
You can find the entry form for the awards here.
Tickets can be purchased here.
A reminder of this year’s inaugural event
And finally, a few tweets from the night:
Last night was a bit of a spectacle #NorthernDigitalAwards pic.twitter.com/wMzkRoVoyc
— Fridge Productions (@fffridge) January 23, 2015
.@BBCSport wins Best Website at #NorthernDigitalAwards Top work team (who are obvs drinking tea & beer) #northern pic.twitter.com/fAYrylsZ7v — Stuart Rowson (@StuartRowson) January 22, 2015
Fab night @ProlificNorth #NorthernDigitalAwards some really worthy winners! pic.twitter.com/HGggVaJ0tZ
— Anna Roberts (@HereComesAnna) January 22, 2015
Wow. We’ve (@mediaworksuk) just won Best Large Agency Award at #NorthernDigitalAwards ! So proud of all involved and the staff we have — Kev Strong (@KevStrong) January 22, 2015
R.O.EYE WINNERS!!!! Best affiliate campaign #NorthernDigitalAwards pic.twitter.com/G1N2aBxpqx
— R.O.EYE (@ROEYE) January 22, 2015
404 – award not found #NorthernDigitalAwards — Extreme Creations (@ectweet) January 22, 2015
We didn’t win the #NorthernDigitalAwards but I have just had a bunch of free booze so it’s not all bad I guess.
— Elliot Callard (@elliotcallard) January 22, 2015
Never been happier to hand out an award to @almackin and @formisimo #NorthernDigitalAwards pic.twitter.com/12GEJla1gS — Steve Kuncewicz (@SteveKuncewicz) January 22, 2015
Enjoying various agency interpretations of the lounge suit dress code. #northerndigitalawards
— Carley Centen (@ccentenrun) January 22, 2015
What a great night with our friends from Glasgow 2014 #NorthernDigitalAwards Olympic Friends from Fiji and Guam! pic.twitter.com/It4zLRn8Ic — Katy Atkinson (@KatyorKate) January 22, 2015
Fun Crowd @ProlificNorth #NorthernDigitalAwards @Branded_3 @KMPDigitata pic.twitter.com/pGbhdhs6VH
— Venn Digital (@venndigital) January 22, 2015
