Awards are Wicked Awesome!

by Sally Ramsay, Thursday, Jun 26, 2008, 08:06am I love awards!  I can't say I love doing all the required paper work for awards, but I sure do love winning the awards!  And we win a lot at Pierpont!  Most recently, we won two silver and one bronze Excalibur Awards, given by PRSA Houston.  It was quite a night! 

The awards dinner and presentation, held at the Junior League, was titled "Picture Perfect," and the evening lived up to the billing.  Pierpont was the sponsor of the Communicator of the Year Award, and I had the pleasure of presenting the award to John Hoffmeister, CEO of Shell Oil Company.  John wasn't able to be there, but I had a great time without him!  And, our very own Ben Wheatley reviewed the "Top 10 PR Blunders of the Year."  Talk about PR "pictures" nobody wanted to claim!  Ben and I decided that the Top 10 needs to be owned by Pierpont, so he and I will take ownership of that fun gig next year!

The Pierpont winners this year were our Save-a-Lot, Harris County Disaster Housing Assistance Program and Verizon Wireless teams.  Save-a-Lot's silver Excalibur was for the grocery chain's expansion corporate identity campaign we initiated.  The Harris County Disaster Assistance Program silver Excalibur was for the external communications campaign we launched, and the bronze Excalibur for Verizon Wireless was for the charitable giving program we developed for the client.

Personally, I did not have any awards submissions this year; waa, waa.  Some years you have those incredible programs or initiatives that you develop for clients, some years you don't.  This is a "don't" year for me, buy hey, there is always next year!

But the biggest of the big winner this year, the Grand Excalibur award, was an incredible campaign and justly deserved!  Bernstein & Associates won for their "100 Year Anniversary Campaign" for Blue Bell Ice Cream.  Can you imagine working on that campaign?  I mean, how cool is that?  I bet the team got free ice cream, too!!  Anyway, hats off to Sharon Bernstein and her team for executing an awesome campaign!!  I'm going to see if I can covertly work with Sharon on the Blue Bell account....do you think Phil would notice I was gone?

Speaking of awards, Pierpont was honored as the 15^th Best Place to Work in our employee size category of 1 - 100 Employees.  Talk about competition - the lowest score in our category was 95.12 points out of 100!  Mercy, were the scores close or what?  The other categories started their winning scores in the mid 80's, so as you can see, the competition was stiff in our category!  We were even in competition with one of our clients - awkward!  Fortunately, they came in at 10^th place!  Whew, that could make for strained business relations.

Any way you look at it, we were very excited to be a winner!  That says a lot for our firm; this is year five for winning a Best Places to Work award!  Pretty awesome!  This award is won by the employees, no secret calculation, no complicated voting process, no winning of an award just because you entered.  Nope, it is all about the pure unadulterated joy of working at Pierpont.  Besides, isn't that what winning awards is all about?  Pure unadulterated joy for what you do.