Last night the Sheraton Hotel on Park Lane played host to the first black tie A4U Awards ceremony. 400 affiliates, advertisers and staff from agencies and networks alike donned their finest for the event that recognised and rewarded the very best in affiliate marketing.

There were 16 awards in total and we were delighted our network, employees and merchants emerged as winners. Most notably for us we won the Publisher’s Choice of Network (for the second year in a row), significant as it was voted for by the wider affiliate community. We also picked up (again for the second year), the Best Network Innovation for ShopWindow, our shopping portal that enables affiliates to have product comparison capabilities for nearly 5 million products.

You may recall from our South Park inspired banners on the a4u Forum that both Julie Wood and Thuy Pham were up for the Publisher’s Choice of Account Manager and so we were delighted that Julie was the eventual winner with Thuy as runner up.

For those of you who couldn’t make the Awards here is a brief rundown of the categories and winners;

Best use of Creative – Winner, Prezzybox
Best use of Affiliate Marketing as part of an integrated campaign – Winner, Hotel Chocolat with Play.com highly commended
Best Network Innovation – Winner, Affiliate Window, ShopWindow toolset
Best Merchant Innovation – Winner, Prezzybox with Firebox runners up.
Finance Vertical Award – Winner, Experian
Retail Vertical Award – Winner, Graham Keen, BuyaGift
Technology & Telecoms Award – Winner, SKY with Vodafone highly commended
Travel & Leisure Vertical Award – Winner, Travelodge
Gaming Vertical – Winner, Virgin Games

PUBLISHERS CHOICE AWARDS – These are voted for by the members of the A4U Community

Publisher’s Choice of Network – Winner, Affiliate Window. Runners up were Affiliate Future.
Publisher’s Choice of Account Manager – Winner, Julie Wood and Runner up, Thuy Pham, both 2 of our very own AWin superstars.
Affiliate Manager of 2008 – Winner, Chris Clarkson of Sunshine.co.uk. Highly commended, Zak Edwards of Prezzybox
Agency of the Year – Winner, Existem AM
Publisher of the Year – Winner, eConversions with QuidCo runners up
Affiliate Marketing Blog of the Year – Winner, Here.org Kieron Donoghue.
Affiliates4U Award for Excellence – Nicky Iapino

Once the awards had been distributed everyone was invited to the Oxygen Lounge where we were hosting a special aviation themed after dinner party. Every attendee to the party received a boarding card with tear off complimentary drink strips and the lounge came complete with AWin decked out Air Hostesses, a 6 foot ‘aw’ water wall, Nintendo wii, fully stocked bar with our own A.W.O.L. cocktail, ice cream girls called ice angels and a standalone bar serving pure flavoured oxygen (a 5 minute hit was enough to blow away any cobwebs).

The night was a great success and we are over the moon with the results, we would like to thank everyone who nominated and voted for us, we are grateful for the support and we have some great things planned for the upcoming year that will ensure that we provide the best possible affiliate marketing service.

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This entry was posted by Kirsty Grimes on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 2:43 pm and is filed under A4U, Network News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.