Bollocks to self-effacing stuff today.
Every so often, bits of validation of what you’re doing happen, and this is one of those days.
Last summer, we were putting our annual Guide to Platform Pricing together. It was a bit of a landmark one for us, because for the first time it wasn’t just me, late at night with a bottle of Glenfarclas, a calculator, a laptop and a load of post-it notes. Steve and Sam had joined and were kicking my ass to make it better.
As part of the Guide we wanted to debunk the idea of there being one platform to rule them all in terms of pricing, so we created an awards section. We thought about doing an event thing off the back of it, but it filled us all with fear and loathing. There are quite enough events already. So instead, we wrote the section as if it were an awards ceremony, and had a giggle doing it.
It came time to promote the Guide and we turned to our old friends from MRM Digital for a hand. Given how much time we all waste on Twitter, it seemed obvious to do a Twitter ceremony, so the MRM guys went about setting this up for us. You can find out more about it here. It was a laugh.
Anyway, at the 2014 Investment Marketing Innovation Awards, we picked up two plaudits:
- Highly Commended for Most Innovative Event, jointly with MRM
- Winner of Social Media, jointly with MRM
I’m incredibly proud of both of them, but something else happened that made me even happier than the Highly Commended or the win. I’ll explain.
We were also shortlisted in the Best Campaign category. Now, we didn’t win, but we got in there among some massive names with multimillion spends and that’s pretty incredible for a wee company with 6 folk in it out of Leith.
This award considered our relentless profiling of direct platform pricing using our now-infamous heatmaps in the national press. The guys here, particularly Steve Nelson and Mark Locke, have been tireless in doing and placing the analysis in an attempt to help investors understand what’s going on in this rapidly evolving space. It hasn’t been a campaign in the traditional sense; we have no budget and have spent literally nothing other than our time: lots and lots of time. To be shortlisted alongside Aberdeen, Investec (with a little agency called M&C Saatchi) and Henderson Global Investors is unbelievable. Nucleus won, by the way, which is also cool. The year of the little(ish) guys.
We’re taking this as validation of our approach: to make the complex simple, and to never stop poking the industry in which we work with a big, pointy stick.
And if we can do this for ourselves with no budget at all, imagine what we could do for your business if you chucked a bit of budget our way.
Self-congratulatory blog over. Now for a drink. Slainte.
