🏆 the 2023 cookywook social media awards
Celebrating the very best content that I specifically saw and liked.
Marketing awards are very strange. To an outsider, they celebrate the best creativity and talent the industry has to offer, where the most outstanding work gets its moment to shine. But as insiders, we know better.
Most marketing awards are shady affairs. They're typically pay-to-enter, so goodbye to most small independent businesses or teams with strained budgets. And they're entered mainly by agencies who want to win awards for their work, so they can win further work in the future.
So you get very strange results. Results for ads that never actually ran anywhere, glossy pitch videos with grossly inflated results, and work winning awards that is… not the best work for the category as described.
This isn't to knock the folks who win these things. Not at all. A lot of great work gets celebrated. But I've always been suspicious of them and mostly not bothered entering - recognition of our LinkedIn presence by actual users means so much more to me than an award for Best Use of LinkedIn For Growing Online Community (Finance Category).
But I'm informed that this is how awards must work. Scouring EVERY bit of marketing from a year would be a big ask. Even directors have to submit their films to the Oscars and do big For Your Consideration promotions. There has to be some process, right?
Introducing: the cookywook social media marketing awards 🏆
I've done this a few times, and it's always fun! My awards are a totally open field - just by posting online, you're eligible! No need to submit. No need to pay me a £250 entry fee. No need to book a big expensive table at the ceremony. No need to be a sponsor of the show. Good work gets recognised, and that's it.
Of course, I can't see everything. So there's definitely good stuff out there I'll miss. Thank you to the, um, six people that got back to my open call for submissions on LinkedIn - it really helped.
Enough waffle. Here are the awards and winners!
WEIRDEST CONTENT OF THE YEAR
Thank you to the numerous people who nominated "Richard Cook" in this category. But I am, alas, ineligible for my own awards. Instead, the award goes to:
The Tom Skinner / Brita UK collab
There's so much to love here. I have a particular soft spot for bizarre collabs, and 2023 was full of them. We had "Conchita Wurst // booking.com", "Mixie and Munchie // a24", "Peacocks // Michael Owen", and who could forget "Jedward // Gas Networks Ireland?"
And seeing Tom 'was on the Apprentice in 2019' Skinner wax lyrical about the benefits of Brita filters from the front seat of a van truly brings a tear to my eye. More of this, please!
Honourable mentions:
A few people nominated the Opera GX account and that Microsoft Edge tweet. But that style is a bit childish, and faking competitor tweets is a fast track to getting yourself in big trouble.
Cinnabon's chaos marketing
MOST CREATIVE USE OF FORMATS
No, I'm not giving this to any of those CGI activations of handbags floating around Big Ben or whatever. They occupy a weird space of being a bit creative (someone had to create it) but also utterly uncreative - like, what's the point or substance here? Instead, I'm giving this to…
The KFC Stuffing Stacker Launch
Who doesn't love using user-generated content for a launch campaign? Who among us has never written, "You said, we listened!" and called it a day? So kudos to KFC for turning that on its head and doing an anti-UGC idea. Deliberately giving customers what they don't want is bold, and I'd love to see more of it!
Honourable mentions:
There weren't many other nominations in this category. But shoutout to Margie the Hun for finding a singular good use for AI. If you don't know, the account reimagines Marge Simpson as a suburban British hun. Just great stuff.
POST OF THE YEAR
A hotly-contested category, but this year, it goes to…
The Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources tweeting about spawning salmon
This just really gets me. And it's my post of the year because of who it's from as much as what it is. The Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources does a great job with a challenging brief - creating social content for the US government department in charge of, I'm guessing, rivers and rocks and stuff? And I thought making banking cool was hard.
But they've found a way! Getting a government department to sign off on this tone is an achievement, and the content is always a joy. This particular one gets my pick because I love anything "live laugh love" adjacent.
Honourable mentions:
Ok, hear me out. My honourable mention (borderline joint winner) is PLT's coverage of the Super Bowl.
I just have so many questions. "Why is PLT tweeting about the Superbowl in the first place?" would probably be the first. I guess PLT has an international presence, and the Super Bowl is a big deal in the US.
But they tweeted this from their main account, which mostly posts about Love Island, pasta (cookywook awards winner 2022), and cheese bites (cookywook awards winner 2021). Iconic and deeply puzzling behaviour.
This is weirdly common across the industry, though. Boohooman nearly broke Threads with this post:
I just have questions.
BEST ‘LESS GOOD USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA’
This one goes to the big man himself:
Rishi Sunak does not understand TikTok transitions.
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This is a fascinating one to watch. Presumably, Rishi, or his social content handler, is aware of the concept of TikTok transitions, like when you cover the lens and cut to something different. But the point of a transition is to… transition to something else. You don't just put your hand on the lens and then keep talking.
Of course, this created a moment with people making memes carrying on after the transition. And was this all a classic ploy to get us to share a piece of content deliberately done wrong? Dunno that seems overly tactical for a short video about Government grants for southeast Northumberland. And remember: just because we're talking about it doesn't mean it worked.
Honourable mentions:
British Airways trying to stop their pilots from creating fun content for social media (honestly baffling)
Ryanair doubling down on charging an elderly couple £55 each to print off a sheet of paper at the airport
And I STILL strongly think the Paralympics TikTok account is profoundly offensive and irresponsible
OTHER STUFF I LIKED
There's no category here; I'm giving up on the format to mention a few more cool things.
Liquid Death electrocuted people
More brands should electrocute their customers, honestly.
The 'vimpto' campaign
This got deleted from their channels for some reason, but I caught it! And I appreciated it. More brands should find the bit about their brands that people get wrong - even if it goes against your 'brand bible'. Own it!!!
The RNIB crusading against bad alt text users
They're a good lot over at the RNIB and are doing good work calling out brands that aren't on top of their alt-text game. It's a brilliant reactive strategy that promotes their work AND helps educate the rest of us to do better.
I'm guilty of writing lazy alt text or - gasp - neglecting to add any. But I'm trying to do better in 2024! I'm currently chucking my images into an ongoing 'alt text' ChatGPT thread and tweaking the results - and so far, it's working great!
STUFF TO LEAVE IN 2023
As we look forward, I'm making a plea to other social media managers: let's cut this out.
We're clever, creative people - capable of coming up with original ideas. I'm begging you, please don't make me participate in any more copy-paste trends. And if you're a social media manager yourself, please stop doing them. We can do better.
Oh, and stop referring to Social Media Managers as "admin". Please and thank you.
I’m very sad Mixie and Munchie didn’t win
Before I entered the workforce, I used to think that trophies meant a thing. Now I realise you just have to pay for it and join lots of awards dinners. LOL.