Mark Ritson scoops PPA columnist of the year award

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson scooped the prestigious columnist of the year award at the PPA Awards last night.

Ritson triumphed over six other columnists from the consumer and business press to chalk up his fourth PPA columnist of the year title. Marketing Week columnist Helen Edwards, who has previously won the PPA and BSME columnist of the year awards was also nominated in the category.

The PPA judges said: “Mark’s writing is authoritative, provocative, riveting and is backed up by unshakeable research foundations. He is clearly not afraid to say it how it is, and this honest, refreshing writing style really made these columns stand out.”

Writing for Marketing Week has been my single greatest pleasure for more than 10 years so to win the PPA Award is the cherry on the cake.

Mark Ritson

Mark, who celebrated his 10th anniversary as a Marketing Week columnist last year, added: “It’s amazing to win something like the PPA given just how big and broad the competition was for the award. You think about all the publications – online and off – with columnists and it boggles the mind.

“Writing for Marketing Week has been my single greatest pleasure for more than 10 years so to win the PPA Award is the cherry on the cake.”

The winning columns submitted were:

‘If ‘Black Lives Matter’ to brands, where are your black board members?‘ was an expert dissection of what companies said and did in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, highlighting the hypocrisy of brands in their reaction to racial injustice.

‘In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive‘ dissected the opportunities and threats facing businesses previously reliant on in-person interactions that were moving online.

The third was a piece calling on marketers working for oil companies to “stop enabling hypocrisy” by overseeing advertising that masks the environmental problems caused by big oil.