2024 Gartner Marketing & Communications Awards

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Successfully repositioned marketing from being a reactive order taker to a proactive business partner.

• Successfully led or contributed to enterprise-wide projects or initiatives that demonstrably supported enterprise goals.

• Successfully managed Marketing through adversity, such as budget cuts, talent challenges or macroeconomic pressures.

• Successfully built or rebuilt a marketing function from the ground up. 

• Successfully spearheaded growth or innovation initiatives that introduced capabilities new to the organization, industry or customers with demonstrable positive impact.

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Created and rolled out new corporate narratives and/or brand narratives.

• Repositioned or refreshed corporate and/or product brand(s)

• Redefined organizational brand architecture

• Measured and/or reported on brand and/or reputation health

• Demonstrated the value and impact of brand investments to internal stakeholders

• Delivered new and salient brand experiences that change audience perspectives

Focus Area: Content and Campaign Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Partnered effectively with cross-functional leaders, executive leaders and managers by clearly defining respective roles during various stages of change management

• Effectively tracked change impacts and acceptance to recognize emerging risks and course-correct communication plans

• Supported leaders and managers in creating clear and compelling communication about organizational transformation, desired culture or behavior change

• Sensitively handled existing change fatigue, information overload and/or fear of new technology

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Created measurement plans of any altitude (function- or project-level) that use metrics and measurement methods tailored to desired audience and/or business outcomes  

• Collaborated with business partners to develop outcomes-focused metrics and/or measurement methods for marketing or communications projects  

• Created dashboards or reports that make it easy for teams to summarize their function’s/project’s performance on key metrics 

• Created reports that clearly outline to leaders how Communications has supported key business outcomes 

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate the above impact by how they have:

• Established criteria for determining when/if to collaborate at all

• Enabled clarity and alignment of resource contributions (over time)

• Employed governance tactics that keep initiatives moving forward, faster

• Embedded agility with respect to altering resource commitments when necessary

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they are: 

• Building compelling experiences that deepen customer engagement by connecting channels 

• Developing sophisticated methods of sensing and proactively responding to customer needs 

• Applying automated personalization and/or next-best action design

• Coordinating between multiple teams to facilitate a cohesive customer journey

Focus Area: Content and Campaign Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have:

• Executed a well-designed strategy that resulted in high impact content across channels

• Supported dynamic, modular content experiences that resonate across the customer journey

• Scaled content through advanced, agile content operations 

• Differentiated content that had a measurable impact on the organization

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Created and implemented a strategic workforce plan for marketing and/or communications

• Upskilled, trained, and planned career paths of internal marketing and/or communications teams

• Implemented programs focused on shared purpose, collaboration, and deeper connections between team members

• Implemented programs targeted to marketing and communications employees’ personal growth and well-being

• Implemented flexible work initiatives - including flexibility in location, work hours, and autonomy

• Implemented Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives specific to marketing and communications

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate:

• Cross-functional collaboration with business and data partners that deliver greater impact through use cases. Use cases which depend on customer and marketing data to deliver business outcomes. 

• Progressive success in leveraging data to support new marketing use cases or increase the effectiveness of existing use cases.

• Effective customer analytics capabilities deployed at scale, for example personalization across channels including service, or customer value metrics in predictive modeling . B2B lead, prospect and customer examples are encouraged and welcome .

• Programs to increase marketing’s usage of marketing analytics that delivered verifiable outcomes. 

• Programs of measurement that prove marketing’s impact on business outcomes. For example, use of marketing analytics methodologies to demonstrate marketing’s impact, such as marketing mix modeling, experimentation and attribution.   

• Operational performance measures that drive continuous improvement (good work management systems/processes) - measures that help us drive towards improved operational efficiency.

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate the following: 

• Small idea: Changes and initiatives of modest resource commitment and outlay. For the purposes of this award, small ideas are deemed as taking ~1-4 months from idea to execution and fewer than ~4 in-house FTEs to execute.

• Big impact: Demonstrated impact on audience attitudes and behaviors, as well as organizational outcomes. For the purposes of demonstrating the impact of your idea, ensure that you clearly articulate the business-impact that the work had on your organization. 

Focus Area: Content and Campaign Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Effectively reached and equitably engaged non-wired employee segments (e.g., those on the road or in a facility without constant access to digital messages) as a part of a hybrid workforce (i.e., employees with different onsite/remote statuses)

• Leveraged managers as employees’ preferred channel of communication to ensure a consistent, positive employee experience

• Implemented ambassadorship or advocacy programs (e.g., for change, culture, brand, etc.) to align employees with the organization’s vision

• Effectively partnered with HR or other internal support functions to manage enterprise communication channels, platforms and tools (including AI-enabled tools)

• Sparked excitement among employees for working with new technology (i.e., working with “robocolleagues” or “cobots”)

Focus Area: Content and Campaign Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate how they have: 

• Created or refreshed your ESG, Sustainability, or DEI communications strategy that has had a tangible impact on your organization

• Found innovative ways to use ESG, Sustainability, or DEI communications to connect with and influence your most important audiences 

• Collaboration with other teams (such as Marketing, Sales, HR, or ERM) to either help select which ESG, Sustainability, or DEI  issues to engage with and/or amplify the value of those commitments. 

• Created highly effective reports on your ESG, sustainability, or DEI commitments and achievements. This could include either/both formal (e.g., CSRD) or informal reporting to internal and/or external audiences

Focus Area: Leadership and Functional Excellence

Winning entries may include approaches that demonstrate: 

• Execution of technology that has enabled innovative experiences for customers, employees or other stakeholders 

• Execution of technology that has demonstrated a clear return on investment for the organization and/or enabled new business opportunities  

• Strategic collaboration on marketing technologies between IT, CX, sales, customer service or other internal or external partners  

• Adaptive processes that enable progressive adoption of new technology and use cases