Welcome to the Communiqué Awards

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Welcome to the Communiqué Awards 2023

For a quarter of a century, the Communiqué Awards have been proudly elevating and celebrating excellence within the healthcare communications industry in the UK and Europe. Since the inaugural Awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel, London in 1998, the Awards have become a calendar staple in our diaries and Communiqué trophies adorning desks and cabinets has become a symbol of sector-leading work.

The Awards were founded in 1998 by a small group of enterprising agency leaders who sought to achieve greater recognition of the importance of communications within the overall marketing mix and establish an ambitious set of standards by which to measure the difference that our work makes to patients’ lives. Their vision, championed and supported from the very beginning by PM Group, has undoubtedly contributed to the fundamental role that healthcare communications enjoys across our industry today, and has succeeded in raising standards, driving innovation, and improving the systematic measurement and evaluation of our work. Today, our environment bears little resemblance to the environment of 25 years ago and our work has evolved to meet the needs of today, often using channels that didn’t exist when the Communiqué Awards were founded. It’s hard to believe that the mighty Google wasn’t founded until September 1998!

While we support and champion change in many areas, one area that hasn’t changed is the positive exposure, industry credibility and team motivation that results from being a Communiqué Winner. Winning a Communiqué Award continues to be an independent validation by an impartial, experienced team of industry leaders that can really promote your team, your agency, or your company to stand out from the crowd in the sector, helping to hire and retain the best talent or attract new business. It’s a great feeling to receive recognition from your peers and in such a public way.

There is still work to be done. In its 25th year, the Communiqué Awards encourages and recognises meaningful change in important newer areas such as corporate social responsibility and diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace.

We have also continued to revise and simplify the entry criteria for a number of categories based on the thoughtful feedback of our judging panel. For 2023, across most of the Healthcare Communications categories, we have split the ‘effectiveness’ section into two, allowing for greater differentiation between KPIs/metrics versus real impact and outcomes.

In a further change for this year we have revised five of the categories and placed them under a new heading of Creativity and Innovation Awards. There is no doubt that one of the key benefits that our teams and agencies bring to the industry is this fresh thinking and new ideas. It is also one of the areas that needs championing and celebrating in its own right. Therefore the criteria and scoring for these categories now place much more emphasis on the innovation, bravery and risk than on measured results.

We’re proud to see how our industry has emerged from the pandemic more strongly than ever and we look forward to hearing about the finest examples or your work at the judging in May and to recognising and celebrating the winners in the summer.

Here’s to the next 25 years!

Communiqué Awards Co-Chairs

Jeremy Clark, Founder and Chair, Clark Health Communications
Fiona McMillan, Vice-President, International Communications, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals

The Communiqué Awards are rightly a highlight of the healthcare communications industry calendar, and the boost that a win gives to an agency and all its people is tremendous. Oxford PharmaGenesis celebrated our most successful year ever in 2020, despite the unique challenges of a global pandemic, and entering the awards in 2021 felt a natural way to thank everyone for their commitment and dedication. As a company with a broad Medical Affairs focus, we’ve been delighted to see the Communiqué Awards evolve in recent years to include a wider range of more medical-oriented categories. This very much reflects the growth in prominence of Medical Affairs in the pharma industry, and the updated category of Medical Affairs Agency of the Year seemed like an exciting opportunity to showcase the work Oxford PharmaGenesis has been doing in this area.

Richard White, Chief Operating, Oxford PharmaGenesis

We are honoured and delighted to have won Communique’s inaugural Leadership Award for Action on Workforce Diversity and Inclusion. We have worked hard, top down and bottom up, to make a meaningful difference – we’ve tried to embed diversity, equity and inclusion across all aspects of our business, not just internally but also externally in our client and community outreach. It’s a huge privilege for our whole team to have our efforts recognised in this way. We recognise that we are still on a learning journey and we will continue to endeavour to do the best we can to make sure that D&I is in our DNA, both individually and collectively at McCann Health Medical Communications.

Alice Choi, MSc MPH PhD CMPP, Chief Operating Officer, McCann Health Medical Communications

We’re beyond proud to have won the inaugural Communiqué award for Agility and Flexibility. It recognises and celebrates the hard work of a group of dedicated collaborators, who were determined to support patients during the first wave of COVID-19. The high quality of all the finalists’ work and the rigor of the judging process make it all the more significant. It’s a source of great pride, joy and motivation for all the Dovetail team and our wonderful clients.

Claire Munro, Owner, Dovetail Strategies

We were delighted to win two awards at the Communiqué Awards 2021, in the categories of Best Use of Data Visualisation and Charitable Campaign of the Year. After what has been a challenging time for the entire charity sector, we are very proud that our innovative work has been recognised at such a prestigious event. 2021 saw the World Health Organization launch their Global Road Map to defeat meningitis. As one of the wide range of stakeholders who participated in its development, it’s very rewarding to have recognition from the charity sector on our role. Thank you for your support.

Liz Rodgers, Research Project Manager, Meningitis Research Foundation