Brief

Paratus created the concept of the Ambition AXA Awards as a platform for AXA UK to communicate its deep commitment to talent development as a core strand of its Ambition AXA corporate strategy.

We launched the inaugural Ambition AXA Awards in March 2011 with the aim of rewarding young people who have demonstrated extreme talent and ambition.  There were five awards in Science, The Arts, Community, Sport and Enterprise. Each of the five winners (aged between 11 and 18) received a bespoke mentoring package worth up to £40K each (a total prize fund of £200K).

Paratus’ brief was to plan and manage the Ambition AXA Awards from the launch, throughout the campaign to the results ceremony in November 2011. This comprised media relations, finding and working with partner associations, a schools and unions programme to reach young people through their education establishment, recruiting and managing celebrity ambassadors, a social media campaign and creation of a website & application process.

Activity

Paratus devised a media strategy using celebrity ambassadors for each category to create interest in the awards.  The celebrities were Karren Brady (Enterprise), Alex James (The Arts), Jason Bradbury (Science), Amy Williams (Sport) and Camila Batmanghelidjh (Community).

In addition, we partnered with key associations for each category and used their networks and contacts to reach the right target market. So for the Arts category we worked with Arts Council England, for Sport the Youth Sport Trust and so on.  We also implemented a schools and unions programme to ensure the messages were reaching teachers who could encourage talented pupils to apply.  This was done through inserts in all the major union conference packs and ads and editorial pieces in union newspapers.

To keep the campaign fresh throughout a long 10 months, Paratus commissioned three pieces of research throughout the year, which each had a specific geographic focus to ensure good regional coverage (Ambition hotspots, measuring ambition across the country etc).  We then used this content to run an extensive media relations campaign targeting the national, regional and specialist media through a mixture of exclusives and general distribution news stories.

The social media campaign meant that the target age group was kept constantly engaged with the awards through a dedicated Facebook page that we set up and managed throughout the programme against a rolling weekly plan.

Results

The Ambition AXA Awards generated thousands of entries; the shortlisted 25 children were all exceptionally talented and the five winners will almost certainly become well known in their area in the future. Their details can be found at www.ambitionaxaawards.com.

Paratus generated over 600 pieces of media coverage of which more than 220 were tier one and more than 70 were in national media including broadcast (BBC Breakfast, Sky News, Radio 5 Live) as well as pieces in key targets including PA, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, The New Statesman and many more.

The Facebook campaign had a total of 422,130 site visitors up until the end of November 2011, with 2,891 friends and 50,676 interactive users.

AXA has also found the Awards to be an excellent way to engage with MPs, policy-makers throughout the campaign and at the prize-giving ceremony on 30 November.

AXA UK has announced that it will be running the Ambition AXA Awards again in 2012.