Achieving the greatest participation since its inception, the MOST Awards 2011 saw more than 600 media owners, media planners, strategists and clients applaud DStv Media Sales, The MediaShop (JHB) and Page Three Media for walking away with the top accolades.
Industry stalwarts Peter McKenzie and Virginia Hollis were honoured by their peers for being media owner and media agency legends respectively; while Jacques du Preez was the media owner innovator for the second time and Ryan Williams was voted media agency innovator.
Through a stringent research process and voting system, DStv Media Sales won the overall media owner award; The MediaShop (JHB) won the best full-service media agency as well as the overall media agency award and; Page Three Media won the best specialist agency award – an accolade introduced at this year’s awards.
“The MOST Awards initiative is based on the principle that consistent performance contributes to business success. MOST is aimed at encouraging and enhancing the communication between two important groups – media agencies and media owners. Ultimately improved understanding will lead to better service-levels and enhance the bottomline,” said Sandra Gordon of Wag the Dog Publishers and founder of the event.
Media agencies and owners completed surveys ranking each other according to various criteria. Freshly Ground Insights conducted the research, and retained the methodology for the sake of consistency and to facilitate trending. There were three key adjustments however – the ranking criteria was brought down to six; the media agency award was split into two categories, specialist and full-service and; an ‘overall’ best question was introduced into each survey.
The outcome of this technique was an overall score for every media owner and every media agency listed in the research with sufficient variance to discern the winners per category and the winners overall. At least 30 votes need to be collected by a media owner or media agency in order to qualify.
PHOTO: Chris Hitchings, CEO of DStv Sales, accepts the award for best overall media owner
