Jury president Ariana Stolarz, who is the global chief strategy officer for marketing at Accenture Song, said that the jury looked for cases that could show a compelling ‘before and after’, and transformations that fed into the business and drove business growth.
Campaigns that demonstrated the traits of a circular economy ‘raced to the top’ of the award’s shortlist, said Stolarz. She also said that ‘for the world to go round, the world of business has to go round,’ adding that campaigns that were ‘good for business, good for people and good for the world’ also came out on top.
Stolarz also said that innovation shouldn’t be used as a synonym for technology, and that the jury were looking for work powered by technology, not led by technology. ‘We saw a lot of cases around product development, analogue, tangible products; we saw a lot of cases about operational readiness, about the new relationship model, where maybe the technology was needed to go to market to scale, but it was not necessarily at the centre of the solution,’ she said.
Speaking about the winner Philips, she said the jury were impressed by both the scale of the Refurb initiative and also how it sets the benchmark for others in the industry to follow. ‘[It’s shocking] to even understand everything that needs to happen inside the organisation for something like this to actually work. You need change how you produce products, how you receive products, how you would package products. There's a lot of stuff that we don't see for something like this to actually work. And Phillips are not just doing this for the holidays, this is how they’re going to go to market now. And they are not doing it just in one market. This is how the world of Phillips is going to operate.’
