By Ngozi Onyeakusi—- Leading telecommunications services provider, Airtel Nigeria, has won a total of 20 awards at the 2020 edition of the Lagos Advertising and Ideas Festival Awards (LAIF), an award platform designed to recognize creative excellence as well as promote excellence in the field of Advertising and Marketing Communications.

In what the award’s organizers have described as unprecedented, Airtel clinched seven Gold, six Silver, six Bronze and the most prestigious Grand Prix at the virtual ceremony, which held recently.

While Airtel won the Grand Prix with its ‘Data is Life’ advertising campaign, its 444 campaign earned it three Gold awards in the Bank, Investment and Other Financial Communication award’s category and also three Gold in the Telecom Product/Services award category. Airtel’s ‘Data is Life’ (DIL) campaign was also adjudged a Gold.

Airtel’s advertising campaign also won nine awards, earlier last year, at the Pitcher’s Awards, taking the company’s total awards for advertising campaigns in 2020 to 29 (twenty-nine), the most it has earned in any year.

The Pitcher Awards is widely considered as one of the most valuable and internationally respected accolades for creative work coming out of Africa. It started as an annual celebration of creativity in West Africa, but beginning with the 2020 edition, the scope has now widened to include all work created, released or implemented anywhere on the African continent in line with its vision to provide the true and authentic benchmark for African creative excellence.

Commenting on the awards, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Airtel Nigeria, Segun Ogunsanya, expressed appreciation to the awards’ organizers for celebrating and promoting excellence while he dedicated the awards to the company’s over 50 million customers across Nigeria, noting that Airtel will not rest on its laurels and will continue to go the extra-mile in connecting and bonding emotionally with all its stakeholders through compelling, relevant, bespoke and inspiring narratives.

It would be recalled that Airtel Nigeria was recently recognized for its efforts in storytelling and PR innovation at the 5th edition of the Lagos Public Relations and Industry Gala (LaPRIGA), a prominent communications industry event at the instance of the Lagos Chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations.

The Corporate Communications Department of Airtel Nigeria was also awarded the ‘Best Corporate Communications Team’ in Africa by the prestigious Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Responsibility Awards (SERAs), a prominent award platform designed to celebrate excellence in the practice of Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Africa.

Airtel Nigeria’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Segun Ogunsanya, was also recently named the ‘Telecoms CEO of the Year’ by telecoms stakeholders under the banner of Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) while the company’s Corporate Communications/CSR Director, Emeka Oparah and its Information Technology Director, Seun Solanke were recently named Corporate Communications Practitioner of the Year and IT Director of the Year by LaPRIGA and the CIO Awards, respectively.

ATCON also awarded Airtel Nigeria the ‘Best Customer Service Operator 2020’ at the ATCON/NTITA award, which held in November, 2020