At last Thursday’s Communiqué Awards, a truly regrettable situation occurred when the winner of the Excellence in Media Relations category was revealed.
After the judging of this category had concluded, an internal PMGroup process failure followed, which ultimately led to the wrong winner being announced. Having re-reviewed the judging discussions, we can confirm that Celebrating the Robotics Revolution in the NHS by Lexington for Intuitive won, and Mindful of Huntington’s by M+F Health for the Huntington’s Disease Association was awarded a high commendation.
We sincerely apologise to both Lexington and M+F Health, the teams involved, their clients, and external partners for this situation. We understand the excitement and pride that comes from winning, and the disappointment felt when missing out on an award. We are also deeply sorry for any impact this has had on both organisations, who worked extremely hard to deliver outstanding campaigns.
PMGroup would also like to emphasise that this process failure was entirely internal and in no way attributable to the Awards’ co-chairs, category group head, or any other member of the judging panel. We hold the diligence and integrity of our judges and the judging process in the highest regard, and it is extremely important to clarify that this mistake was not a result of their involvement.
In the 26 years of running the Communiqué Awards programme and over 1,000 awards presented, this is the first time such a failure in process has occurred. We pride ourselves on the accuracy of our end-to-end process and are currently assessing what changes are needed to ensure this never happens again.