As the deadline for the 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing awards draws closer – it’s now less than seven weeks away – we are turning the spotlight on some of last year’s winners, looking at why the judges felt they deserved to win an award.

First up, let’s look at John Lewis and Manning Gottlieb OMD’s Christmas Bear and Hare campaign, which picked up two awards: Most Effective Brand Campaign, and Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign overall.

John Lewis is famous for its Christmas ads in the UK of course. Whatever the media spend, you could argue the campaign pays for itself in the number of column inches it generates each year, and it has sparked a fierce rivalry among other department stores and grocery retailers to have the most memorable, best-loved Christmas ad.

For its Christmas 2013 campaign, John Lewis and Manning Gottlieb OMD created the ‘Bear and Hare’ campaign, in which the bear, who has never seen Christmas, goes off to a cave to hibernate for the winter, but wakes up on Christmas morning to find a present from his companion the hare. Upon which, he comes out of the cave and joins the rest of the animals enjoying themselves around the Christmas tree. All of which, of course, was made possible by John Lewis.

The retailer was seeking to extend the life of the TV ad in the form of an interactive eBook app. To achieve standout in the cluttered app store environment, it tapped into the second-screening phenomenon. The TV ad was launched by taking over the first ad break in the X-Factor live shows, and featured an unknown Lilly Allen track. Viewers were encouraged to Shazam the ad to download the app. And they did so in great numbers. The Bear and Hare ad became the most scanned ad on Shazam in 2013 with more than 114,000 scans over the Christmas period. Together with rich media iAd activity, this pushed the app to number 2 in the iPad App Store Entertainment category, resulting in almost 300,000 downloads, with an average of four sessions per download.

The judges were impressed with the results, and impressed also by the synergy between the TV and the mobile app campaigns, which is why the campaign picked up the overall award, as well as the Brand award.

The final deadline for this year’s Awards is less than seven weeks away, but to avoid a late-entry fee, you should aim to get your entries in before the Early Bird deadline of 24 July. The Awards, which are now in their sixth year, recognise excellence in mobile marketing across 36 categories, and attracted more than 200 entries each year.

This year sees several new categories added, including Most Effective Smartwatch App, Most Accessible App, and Most Effective Publisher Offering. In addition to the 36 standard categories, there’s also a Grand Prix Award for the best entry overall, and our four People’s Choice Awards, with the shortlist drawn up by a panel of industry experts and the winners chosen by a public vote. The People’s Choice categories and shortlist will be announced in the weeks to come.

The Awards Ceremony will take place on 26 November in London. For more information and details on how to enter the Awards, head for the Awards website.

For information on sponsoring the Awards, please contact john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com