Fresh 2014 took place at the rather swish Hilton hotel, Deansgate. The awards categories were simply brimming with talent! Split over two days, the event featured PR nominees on Thursday 30th and Creative on Friday 31st of October.

Pitch attended the PR awards ceremony, sponsoring and presenting the highly coveted award for ‘Best Digital or Social Media Campaign’. This was awarded to McCann Birmingham for their work with Fruittella. The imaginative ‘Fun with Fruittella’ campaign launched on Facebook with interactive games, puzzles and the ‘Fruit Flip’ competition app; this generated more than 58,000 Facebook fans in less than 7 months. Hugely commendable effort by McCann, we are thrilled that their inspiring achievements have been recognised by the Fresh judges.

The evening’s ‘Sock it to ‘em’ themed entertainment came in the form of the arts and craft exercise of sock design. Each table were required to use the materials provided to design their sock to resemble a celebrity puppet (fashion meets Hobby Craft). A broad range of artistes were featured from Tina Turner and Amy Winehouse to Katie Price and Ron Burgundy. A memorable and certainly unusual start to the evening!

Deserved of an extra special congratulations, is Jessica Beale and Rachel Ferguson for winning The Young Professional Award and to 375 Creative for winning the prestigious Grand Prix award.

We’d like to extend our congratulations to the other remarkable winners of the evening, including but not limited to Weber Shandwick, Hope & Glory, Shackleton PR, Peppermint Soda, McCann Manchester, Havas and Clarity PR.

The evening came to a close at the bar where we devoured bacon butties – adding a rare touch of class to the Hilton!