Almost half of employees don’t expect to receive a Christmas gift from their employer, according to research from Blackhawk Network

• 88% of employees would like to receive a gift from their employer this year, but almost half (46%) believe this is unlikely
• Half of employees would feel disappointed, demotivated, upset or angry if they didn’t receive a gift from  their employer this festive season
• When it comes to gifting this Christmas, almost 2 in 5 (28%) employees would prefer to receive a gift card from their employer

With the festive season upon us, 88% of employees state they would like to receive a gift from their employer as we finish up for the holidays. And, after another tough year defined by the pandemic, employees no longer see gifting as just a ‘nice to have’. In fact, 45% of employees state that it is important for employers to provide gifts and rewards this festive period. These findings come from research conducted by Blackhawk Network looking at seasonal gifting trends.

Almost two fifths (39%) of employees view gifts as recognition for their hard work and the same amount say that Christmas rewards make them feel valued by their employer. Another 32% state that gifts show that employers care and 22% say that seasonal gifts help to keep them motivated. However, staff do not trust that employers understand the need to show their appreciation. Almost half (46%) of employees believe it’s unlikely that they will receive a gift from their employer this Christmas.

Chris Ronald, VP, EMEA Incentives, Blackhawk Network, said: “The Great Resignation combined with economic bounce-back, has resulted in staff shortages at an all-time high.  Adding to this, the competition for talent is driving up salary expectations. This year’s festive challenge is for employers to gift smart. Providing rewards as a ‘thank you’ plays an important role in ensuring that staff feel appreciated. Even small gestures can go a long way in building loyalty and bringing some festive cheer to hard working teams.

The UK is in the midst of a supply chain crisis which is threatening to derail the festive season. Physical gifts, drinks and even rumours that the Christmas turkey may well be in short supply. However, the good news for employers is that gift cards are the preferred choice for almost two-fifths of employees. Delivering these early could help staff get ahead of the rush on family gifts and festive groceries, providing a genuinely useful reward that will leave staff feeling valued and appreciated.”

The business impact of failing to gift or reward

By failing to gift this Christmas, employers risk more than just disgruntled employees; staff morale and satisfaction will be impacted. In fact, half of employees would feel disappointed, demotivated, upset or angry if they didn’t receive a gift or reward from their employer this December.

This is a particular issue for younger generations; 77% of Gen Z and 82% of Millennials would have negative feelings about not receiving a seasonal gift. This is a dangerous state of affairs given that staff turnover is at an all time high amidst the Great Resignation. Gifting should be front of mind as gratitude and appreciation are critical to retaining staff and creating a positive workplace culture.

Gift Smart with rewards that resonate

The traditional Secret Santa is a mainstay of UK office culture but often falls flat. 42% of employees have negative feelings about Secret Santa, with many thinking it’s a waste of money and a waste of time. While Secret Santa can be a fun team building initiative, employers need to gift smart with rewards that are useful and meaningful to employees.

Providing physical gifts could be challenging this year in the midst of a supply chain crisis, shipping delays, a fuel crisis, and shortages of HGV drivers. Blackhawk Network’s recently global holiday gifting research found that consumers are worried about shipping delays and out-of-stocks. A third (34%) of UK consumers surveyed worry that the pandemic will impact their ability to shop and over a quarter (28%) say they will shop earlier this year due to concerns. Employers would do well to turn their attention to gift cards, which are the preferred gift choice for almost  2 in 5 (28%) employees. When it comes to gift cards, the following are most in-demand from staff:

• Multi retailer cards – 25%
• Restaurant or takeaway – 21%
• A food retailer to help with the Christmas dinner shop – 18%
• Entertainment experiences – 15%

However, the best gift is that of choice, with a fifth of employees preferring a gift card that would give them flexibility over all of the above.

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Juliet Caswell, Product and Proposition Director at CR Worldwide, details the importance of incentivised learning to help create brand ambassadors out of staff.

When your brand uses a sales channel to sell its offering, it needs to stand out from the competition. But as your channel staff sometimes sell products or services for other brands which are similar to yours, this can be easier said than done.

Making sure your sales channel staff know and understand your brand and keep it front of mind is fundamental to standing out. They should also adapt the right attitude to want to do more for you, over your competitors. Behavioural change is key to your channel staff achieving these things. And this where the idea of incentivised learning can help.

Learning with incentive

Incentivised learning takes the concept of e-learning and brings it into a reward system, such as for a sales channel incentive scheme. By doing this, it builds upon the idea of online learning, as a way to help upskill your staff, but also encourages employees to behave and perform in the way you desire.

With traditional e-learning, an employer will give their employees some online training to complete in relation to an area of their job. While research shows this form of training, which is growing in popularity, can help upskill staff, the approach of just giving employees the training creates the idea that a business expects their employees to complete it. Knowing the purpose of the training is to benefit the wider business, the employee might also wonder, what’s in it for them?

Rewarding the employee for successfully completing said training can help overcome this hurdle. It takes away the idea that staff are just expected to do the training without question, and instead, shows that the employer values and appreciates them and the time and effort they have put into it. It also helps communicate the importance an employer places on completing the training successfully.

Learning that changes channel behaviours

So how does all this help your brand help your sales channel staff achieve behavioural change?

The way incentivised learning works means brands can use it to reward sales channel staff for building knowledge of everything from their latest products and core services to their company history and business objectives. Incentives could include points that staff can collect to claim a bigger reward, like a personal gift or experience. Staff can also be set goals to help put into practice what they have learnt in their training, such as using their new knowledge to sell a brand’s latest product to a new customer.

By creating sales channel staff who know your brand well, you can achieve behavioural change – that is, the ideal behaviour you want staff to embody to become an effective salesperson for your brand. For instance, how they perform, how well they can sell your products, and how they view your brand over your competitors.

There are different ways incentivised learning could be used to help achieve this behavioural change.

Building mindshare

By providing training that comes with an incentive, you can encourage staff to want to learn more. They know that there is a reward each time they complete training, so there is an incentive to keep building their knowledge. Moreover, the more learning programs they complete, the higher that knowledge can become. As a result, you can create staff with greater mindshare of your brand that can more effectively help sell your offering and convert more customers.

Keeping your brand front of mind

Using incentives to encourage staff to complete training across your business can constantly remind them of your brand, helping to increase brand awareness. For instance, they could associate the rewards they win with your brand, making it feel more prominent than your competitors and helping to keep it front of mind. In doing this, while sales channel staff will have targets to hit, selling for your brand might feel like a priority.

Creating brand ambassadors

Over time, your channel sales staff can become proud experts on your brand. This, paired with the right knowledge, mindset and attitude, will encourage employees to feel loyalty towards it, enough to become a brand ambassador – embodying your brand and everything it stands for. They will speak highly of your brand, not just in their daily job, but outside of their working hours, like in their social circles, at company events and on social media.

Ideal employees to further your brand

Adding a strong learning program to your sales channel can only be a good thing when aiming to build brand awareness and team knowledge. When an incentive is attached to that learning, it doesn’t just help create highly skilled staff, who are better equipped to sell in your sales channel. It helps those staff achieve behavioural change, becoming the ideal employees to take your brand further.

Established in 2002, CR Worldwide helps companies grow by enabling them to reward best behaviours from the people most valuable to their success – employees, customers and partners. In creating award-winning recognition, incentive and event programs, the company’s solutions help companies to engage these people and improve performance.

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The sooner the industry addresses its current gender salary imbalance, the more young talent it will attract, says Taffy Msipa of experiential marketing agency Sense.

As someone just entering the marketing industry, it’s clear to me that a lot of the recent heated debate over the continuing (and very significant) gender pay gap has missed a valuable point: not paying men and women performing the same roles the same amount is not just unfair, it’s bad for business.

The fact that the issue exists in the 21st century is rightly attracting lots of publicity and causing plenty of outrage, because it’s explicitly unjust – why should you get more money just for being a bloke? It simply doesn’t reflect the real world. Women are taking on the same responsibilities as men so should be on the same salaries. However, outside of the ethical arguments, if the inequality persists it will hurt marketing.

In our sector, like many others, the short-term cost of closing the gender pay gap as quickly as possible actually makes good commercial sense because it will pay dividends going forward. Whether you’re an agency or business, you want to attract the best possible marketing talent. Before you can nurture and develop talent, first you have to attract the raw material.

You need to convince graduates that marketing is a great industry to work in, where employees are rewarded based on performance, regardless of their gender. And this issue doesn’t only concern women; an increasing number of men would feel more comfortable working in an environment where both genders are treated equally in terms of pay and rewards.

Since 1997, the Office of National Statistics has been measuring the differences between salaries of men and women across a wide variety of sectors, broken down into quite specific roles. Young people considering their career options can visit the ONS website and download the latest gender pay gap statistics and use them to help decide which sector to work in. It makes sense that the current focus on equal pay will encourage more people who are about to take their first step on the career ladder to do this basic research.

Someone checking the latest figures would see that the current pay gap for ‘marketing associate professionals’, the more junior roles, is 17.1%. This means that men in the same job are paid on average 17.1% more than women.

By then looking at ‘marketing and sales directors’, they could get an idea of whether the pay gap widens with seniority. Does the difference increase the harder you work and the higher you climb in the industry, something many might view as pretty demotivating? The ONS statistics reveal a figure of 12.5% for more senior roles, so male and female salaries actually converge as you progress through the profession.

This is clearly a good thing in terms of attracting people into marketing. However, the fact remains that both junior and senior figures are significantly higher than the overall cross sector UK gender pay gap of 9.1%, meaning that there are plenty of other industries with better salary equality than ours.

So it’s quite simple. Taking action together as an industry to reduce marketing’s gender pay gap now will prevent the talented marketers of the future from choosing another career where men and women are treated more fairly. It will also help to stop those currently working in the sector jumping ship. Finally, it will curb the demotivational and destabilising effects of half the workforce knowing they are being underpaid – and therefore undervalued – compared to their male colleagues.

Of course, most sectors are facing this issue, but those that address it first will steal a march over the others in terms of drawing young talent. By acting now as an industry, we can show we’re forward-looking and promoting a fairer society. Plus, it would be a great way of marketing the industry to graduates like me and growing our talent pool for the future.

Taffy Msipa is a Graduate Account Executive at London and New York based experiential marketing agency Sense.

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Former Managing Director of specialist experiential and staffing agency Blackjack Promotions, Sally Alington, has launched a new global consultancy, Ethos Farm, which aims to help companies transform their approach to the customer experience.

“Business leaders across the globe undervalue service. Yet it can deliver real differentiation in an increasingly commoditised world,” said Sally Alington, Founder and CEO, Ethos Farm. “Companies talk about having a customer-facing workforce but what’s actually needed is staff who fully understand the corporate values and business objectives. Only then can they deliver exceptional service levels that meet both customer and company needs.”

The idea behind the Ethos Farm name is about positively transforming attitudes and corporate cultures, supporting the development of a successful company ethos in which workforces become advocates of the company.

“We help organisations to do this by combining best practice in employee learning and training with the latest communications technologies to transform workforces into brand custodians,” Alington explained.

Alington has brought together a team of globally-recognised experts with in-depth understanding of the latest management practice and training theories, coupled with years of real-world experience at rolling out service improvement programmes for some of the world’s best-known companies, brands and organisations, including Heathrow and Dubai Airport, the BBC and Westfield, to name a few.

She says that at Ethos Farm’s heart is a unique ‘Customer Service Architecture and Engineering’ concept.

Architecture refers to the company’s Consultancy team, headed by Alington, which helps companies develop a blueprint for customer service to align workforces with their values and aspirations.

Engineering relates to the Learning Development and Technology teams, led by Josie Barton and Mat Garner respectively. These provide the building blocks to make the new service blueprint a reality and transform the customer experience.

Alington is a former Director of Retail and Experiential Services at OmniServ and Managing Director of staffing solutions and experiential marketing agency Blackjack Promotions. She has a deep knowledge of designing and implementing customer services solutions and brand ambassador training.

Josie Barton is former Head of Operations, Finance and Planning at the BBC. From building competency frameworks for British Airways to playing a key role in relocating 2,000 BBC staff to BBC Media City in Salford, Barton has 25 years’ experience of people and corporate development, including designing and managing apprenticeship strategies. She also helped set up the BBC’s first ever joint venture outside of the UK – the Media City in Abu Dhabi.

Mat Garner is former Operations and Customer Services Director of a 2,000-strong operation at Heathrow, ex-Head of Commercial for Manchester Airport Group and Passenger Services Director at Stansted Airport, and is highly experienced at designing and developing technology solutions that are built with the end-user in mind.

Ethos Farm Learning and Development is designed to inspire the highest levels of performance from teams using a range of next-generation training tools and techniques. These include specially developed ‘Performance Rooms’, where the Ethos Farm team can deliver immersive training experiences.

The latest state-of-the-art technology will play a vital role in supporting the efficient and effective delivery of Ethos Farm’s customer service design and development concepts. This includes both bespoke and ‘templated’ solutions to drive enhanced service levels and colleague engagement from frontline workforces, as well as providing data analysis to drive insights into staff behaviours and avoid service problems.

“Using a range of tools, we will guide clients and their teams to develop the insights and approaches that will ensure they stay close to their customers and are able to adapt and thrive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world,” adds Alington. “Our role is simply to help clients find the unique formula that will inspire the highest levels of performance from their people.”

The fourth member of Ethos Farm’s founding team is Lauren Walsh, who heads up the company’s operation in the Americas, based out of New York. Walsh is former Global Head of Client Services at Blackjack Promotions, and was previously Travel Retail Regional Manager, L’Oréal Luxe UK for YSL and Biotherm.

The new venture has already secured backing from global facilities solutions provider ABM, with Andy Donnell, Group Managing Director of ABM UK, joining the company’s Board of Directors. ABM is the current parent company of Blackjack.

For UK clients, Ethos Farm is able to advise companies on the complexities of the new Apprenticeship Levy and will soon be accredited as an approved Apprentice Training Provider.

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Inflexion Private Equity has announced that funds managed by Inflexion have completed the buyout of Virgin Experience Days, the UK’s leading experiences business.

Virgin Experience Days offers curated experiences to consumers and corporates, from flying Spitfires to short luxury breaks, selling over 750,000 experiences annually. A high-growth business, revenue has doubled to £50m in three years, driven by a seamless tech-enabled customer experience and the ongoing consumer shift to sharing experiences over tangible goods.

Virgin Experience Days operates B2C and B2B divisions. Virgin Incentives, the B2B division, offers experience days for employee rewards and recognition programmes, with clients such as Barclaycard and Samsung.

As part of the buyout, Inflexion introduced leisure sector expert, Simon McMurtrie, as Chairman and the highly experienced Commercial Director, Matthew Briggs. Both will work alongside CEO Paul O’Brien who has led the business for over a decade. Inflexion will work closely with this team to create long-term sustainable growth.

Capitalising on our international reach, Inflexion will help accelerate sales into new markets with growing demand for personalised experiences, and support the re-launch of Virgin Incentives in the multi-billion-pound employee rewards and recognition market. Inflexion’s digital expertise will also help advance the company’s digital marketing strategy.

Paul O’Brien, CEO, Virgin Experience Days, says: “It’s been a pleasure leading Virgin Experience Days over the last 12 years, and I am proud of the successful business it is today. Inflexion shares our vision for growth, backed by their digital expertise and international reach; we look forward to a prosperous partnership.”

Tim Smallbone, Head of Enterprise, Inflexion, adds: “Virgin Experience Days is a globally recognised and respected brand with international growth potential. We’re delighted to back an ambitious management team in a sector where Inflexion has a strong track record, with businesses such as On the Beach, Reed & Mackay and Reward Gateway. This is the third investment this year for our Enterprise Fund that partners with high-growth businesses in the lower mid-market.”

The Inflexion deal team comprised of Tim Smallbone, Tom Pemberton, Shiva Tiwari and Robin Senivassen. Smallbone and Tiwari have joined the Virgin Experiences board on completion.

Inflexion is an award-winning UK mid-market private equity firm, investing equity of £10m to £150m in high growth, entrepreneurial businesses with ambitious management teams and working in partnership with them to accelerate growth. A mid-market specialist with bespoke teams and dedicated capital, Inflexion backs majority or minority investments in the lower mid-market, mid-market buyouts and provides minority solutions for larger mid-market companies through its dedicated Partnership Capital offering.

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How do you get the maximum amount of impact from an incentive program, asks Dan Kelly of Corporate Rewards.

Employee incentives are a great way to drive the performance of a team – offering a goal to work towards and rewards for staff can really help to drive continuing success. But there are some simple steps that employers should take to help maximise the impact of any incentive scheme.

Build Hype

Before the incentive program even starts, you should be trying to build interest among your team. Don’t just spring it on them as a surprise – let them know in advance what’s going on and why. That way, the incentive won’t seem like it’s just suddenly being dropped on them.

The idea is you build anticipation in order to make sure staff are enthusiastic going into the incentive, which is likely to make them more interested in participating and more motivated to work towards a goal.

This can really help to start your incentive off on the right foot, with staff ready and raring to go.

Identify opportunities to train

The incentive shouldn’t just drive staff towards a goal. It should also give you as the employer an opportunity to identify areas of weakness, and identify what steps you need to help train staff so they can improve their performance which, in the long run, benefits your business.

You might identify a problem throughout your team that needs to be addressed with a group training session; or you might discover smaller individual issues which can be remedied with one to one training or mentoring, such as refining sales technique, or reiterating how to use specific systems and processes within your business.

Reward throughout the incentive

While it’s a good idea to have a final grand prize, you should also be offering smaller rewards to staff on a daily or weekly level. This maintains excitement and interest, and also allows the reward element to be spread more widely across your employees. Acknowledging performance throughout the lifespan of an incentive can help to maintain momentum and motivation.

So consider offering rewards for the person with the highest sales during a shift, or the person who has made the most progress towards the incentive that week. The reward doesn’t need to be something big – a voucher or a small reward can serve as acknowledgement that the hard work being done.

Recognise High Performance

While you should be offering a range of incentives so that as many people can participate as possible, there should be a final ‘star prize’ incentive, and the person who gets it should be the staff member who has had the most consistent levels of high performance.

Their reward needs to be something substantial to highlight that hard work and effort are rewarded. This is often something major like a trip, or access to a major event. The aim is to provide a prize that people will wish they’d won, giving an extra level of motivation going into your next incentive program.

Maintain Momentum

Following the conclusion of your incentive scheme (assuming it’s not a rolling program), it is important to try and maintain the momentum and performance level it has created.

Continuing to recognise performance and running small incentives can help to do this. The key should be to begin to build hype and encourage staff to work towards fun, attainable goals. This helps to create much stronger foundations for future incentives to be successful.

Incentives can be a hugely rewarding undertaking, not just for your staff but also for your business in terms of increased sales, increased performance, higher morale and reduced staff turnover.

Dan Kelly is a founding partner and Sales and Marketing Director of Corporate Rewards, which offers a range of services for employers looking to run incentive and motivation programs for employees and channel staff, working with some of the world’s largest companies such as Microsoft and Dell in his position as Sales and Marketing Director.

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Chinese beer brand Tsingtao is sponsoring Ping Pong Fight Club, an inter-company ping pong tournament, and has launched a campaign to engage businesses across the UK encouraging employees to roll their sleeves up and rise to the challenge this summer.

Hosted in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow, businesses can register to take part in a lively night of teambuilding and networking, with competitive ping pong and beer included.

The events are being held at secret locations in each city and businesses can register at www.pingpongfightclub.co.uk, with full details revealed to companies when they sign up.

Not open to the general public, Ping Pong Fight Club mimics the underground feel of Fight Club the movie with an eight-table ‘fighting arena’.

Only a few select companies will be able to take part at each event, playing to become the ultimate Ping Pong Fight Club champion, who will then go on to compete in an overall UK final against winners from the other cities.

James Wright, for Tsingtao Beer, says: “Tsingtao Beer is excited to partner with Ping Pong Fight Club, because it’s a world away from the usual team building, networking and corporate nights out. Everyone can have a go at table tennis and we want to encourage all types of businesses, from start-ups to well established industry leaders, to get involved. This event always gets such a great response from staff – from the ultra-competitive to the non-sporty types. Some companies invite their competitors too, as it’s the perfect way to throw down the gauntlet in a fun and social way.”

The next Ping Pong Fight Club event will be in Manchester on July 13. Proceeds from the night will be donated to the MEN’s ‘We Stand Together’ fundraiser supporting the families of those killed and injured in the Manchester Arena attack.

Guests will receive complimentary drinks on arrival – including Tsingtao Beer – as well as company-branded T-shirts and wristbands, keyrings, professional pictures and videos for companies to promote their involvement after the event. There are also prizes on offer, not just for the winning team, but also via an online charity raffle, which last year included brand new professional table tennis tables, camera drones and GoPros. Around the ping pong action, friendly ‘grudge’ matches and robot challenges will take place in surrounding social zones. Face painters will be on hand to draw company logos and tribal colours, while DJs and live MCs will hype up the guests for the battles ahead as they eat food and drink Tsingtao Beer.

Tsingtao Beer is imported by Halewood Wines & Spirits, the UK’s largest independent alcoholic drinks manufacturer and distributor. Family owned and based in Merseyside, Halewood has a comprehensive product range including award-winning Whitley Neill Gin, J.J. Whitley Gin and Vodka, Liverpool Gins and Vodka, Marylebone Gin, Bajan Rum Sixty Six, Crabbie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer, The Pogues Irish Whiskey, and Red Square Vodka.

Tsingtao Beer (pronounced Ching Dow) is brewed by the Tsingtao brewery in Qingdao, China, one of China’s leading brewers, founded in 1903 by German settlers. The Tsingtao brand is sold in more than 50 countries worldwide and accounts for more than 50% of China’s total beer exports. It is the number-one branded consumer product exported from China and the seconnd biggest beer brand in the world by volume.

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Jonathan Grey, Founder and CEO of Ovation Incentives, the technology-led global rewards and recognition specialist, has been named as the new President of the Incentive Marketing Association Europe.

Grey has been an IMA Europe Board member since the inception of the association eight years ago and succeeds Brian Dunne, Managing Director of Action Solutions, as President. The IMA Europe is part of a global IMA network of over 500 agencies and suppliers committed to promoting, creating, and managing the use of incentives and recognition programmes to improve business performance.

Since founding Ovation 15 years ago, Jonathan Grey has been an active participant in the business communities that seek to promote standards and foster relationships in the gift card and business incentive markets in the UK and Europe.

Grey says: “It is a tremendous honour to be appointed to the role of President of IMA Europe.  Under Brian Dunne’s leadership, IMA Europe has grown from strength to strength with members from the Atlantic coast to the Ural Mountains actively engaged in developing standards and driving results for all our clients and colleagues.”

He adds: “In the coming year, I hope to build upon the solid foundations that we have laid down for our industry and continue our traditions of bringing together great people from all over Europe to connect, learn and develop the next generation of incentive marketers.”

Brian Dunne comments: “I am delighted that Jonathan will be taking over the reins and I look forward to supporting him and the rest of the board in the role of Past President.” Dunne will also continue to serve on the IMA Global Board.

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The entry deadline for the Institute of Promotional Marketing Awards 2017 is in less than three weeks on February 28^th – and agencies and brand owners who want to enter their promotional campaigns from 2016 are being encouraged to get their submissions together now.

The IPM Awards 2017 Call for Entries booklet plus top tips on how to write entries and examples of ‘best-in-class’ award-winning campaigns can be found in the awards section of the IPM website.

Richard Pink, the IPM’s Head of Awards, Judging & Entries, says: “Our judges are looking to reward campaigns that stood out in an incredibly competitive market during 2016, that worked hard for the brand and that delivered exceptional results. Tell us your stories and let us know why you deserve to win!”

The IPM is the industry body for promotional marketing, and its awards, which have been running for 40 years, have been created to showcase and champion the best work created in the previous year.

Any campaign which included a promotional element and which ran in the UK during 2016 is eligible for entry. Campaigns which ran outside the UK are also eligible, if they were created by a UK agency or for a UK-based brand or company.

To qualify, campaigns must have been running at some point during 2016; they can have started in 2015 and carried on into 2016, or they can have started in 2016 and run on into 2017. While the IPM would ideally like to see full results, Pink acknowledges that that may not be possible for campaigns which continued into 2017 (or which are still going).

He says: “Obviously, we’d ideally like to see full results, but we realise that, particularly with campaigns which are still live in January and February, that isn’t always going to be possible. In cases like that, we’re encouraging people to enter and explain clearly why they can’t provide absolute results. The judges will understand.”

Further information and advice on this topic is available on Richard Pink’s LinkedIn page.

The IPM also has its own YouTube channel, which features videos from a number of this year’s judges providing their Top Tips on how to create the best possible award entry.

Brands and agencies do not have to be members of the IPM to enter, although IPM members get discounts on their entry fees.

The trophies will be presented at the IPM Awards 2017 Gala Dinner on June 7^th 2017 at the London Hilton on Park Lane.

The headline sponsor for the IPM Awards 2017 is SODEXO and its subsidiaries Protravel, Filmology, Fotorama and Entice. Other partners include Promotional Handling Ltd, Sykes and i-movo.

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The entry deadline for the Institute of Promotional Marketing Awards 2017 is in just 40 days’ time – and agencies and brand owners who want to enter their promotional campaigns from 2016 are being encouraged to get their submissions together now.

The IPM Awards 2017 Call for Entries booklet plus top tips on how to write entries and examples of ‘best-in-class’ award-winning campaigns can be found in the awards section of the IPM website.

Richard Pink, the IPM’s Head of Awards, Judging & Entries, says: “It’s time for brands and agencies to submit their Awards entries and help us celebrate the amazing talent, the hard work and the promotional successes of 2016! As the industry body for promotional marketing, the IPM is here to proudly showcase and champion your work over the past year, and ensure you and your peers receive the industry-wide recognition you deserve.”

The IPM has just run an online Masterclass on crafting the perfect IPM Awards entry, hosted by Richard Pink, which attracted nearly 100 attendees from agency, service companies and brands.

One issue which the Masterclass highlighted was a concern over results from campaigns which started in 2016 but which continued on into 2017 and either finished close to the February 28^th entry deadline, or which will still be running after that.

Pink says: “Obviously, we’d ideally like to see full results, but we realise that, particularly with campaigns which are still live in January and February, that isn’t always going to be possible. In cases like that, we’re encouraging people to enter and explain clearly why they can’t provide absolute results. The judges will understand.”

Further information and advice on this topic is available on Richard Pink’s LinkedIn page.

The IPM also has its own YouTube channel, which features videos from a number of this year’s judges providing their Top Tips on how to create the best possible award entry.

Marketing campaigns which ran anywhere in the world are eligible for entry to the IPM Awards 2017, so long as they included a promotional element and they were created and run either by an agency based in the UK or on behalf of a brand based in the UK.

Brands and agencies do not have to be members of the IPM to enter, although IPM members get discounts on their entry fees.

The trophies will be presented at the IPM Awards 2017 Gala Dinner on June 7^th 2017 at the London Hilton on Park Lane.

The headline sponsor for the IPM Awards 2017 is SODEXO and its subsidiaries Protravel, Filmology, Fotorama and Entice. Other partners include Promotional Handling Ltd, Sykes and i-movo.

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