SMC Communications wins Canadian Search Award for Breaking Bread Campaign
We are thrilled to announce that SMC Communications was recently awarded a first-place prize at the 2020 Canadian Search Awards. The agency received top honours in the Best Use of Search – Third Party / Not-for-Profit Sector category for our Breaking Bread campaign, with judges recognizing our team’s creative content strategy and rapid action to help the restaurant industry in response to the COVID-19 crisis.
The Canadian Search Awards is a national industry competition celebrating the very best in PPC, SEO and Content Marketing. Each year, an esteemed panel of leading industry experts come together to evaluate and reward the outstanding achievements of agencies and individuals working in the Canadian search industry.
The 2020 winners were revealed during a live virtual ceremony hosted on September 17. SMC’s Breaking Bread campaign beat out the competition to win first place in the Best Use of Search – Third Party / Not-for-Profit Sector division. This year, the category was judged by Motoko Hunt, president of AJPR, an international search marketing consultancy serving the Japanese market.
“This was a timely campaign that provided an awesome response to a devastating financial situation for the Canadian foodservice industry,” said Hunt of Breaking Bread. “This campaign is a very nice example of a well-executed content strategy. Especially convincing is the strong content distribution via digital PR measures, content curation, newsletter marketing and video content.”
Hunt also applauded the agency’s quick thinking and swift action to launch the timely campaign on behalf of the restaurant industry amidst the rapidly developing COVID-19 pandemic. “The campaign was conceived and produced extraordinarily fast due to the subject matter,” she noted. “(SMC) delivered amazing results from a campaign that had to ramp up so quickly.”
Breaking Bread launched in March 2020 as a local collective of 23 restaurant partners in Vancouver. The initiative has since grown into a nation-wide non-profit with a sophisticated website boasting more than 2,200 Canadian restaurant and foodservice listings and an engaged community of online supporters. Thanks to SMC’s strategic public relations efforts, Breaking Bread has been covered in local and national media outlets across the country, helping to generate public awareness about the crisis facing Canada’s hospitality industry in the wake of COVID-19.
“I am very proud of the impact Breaking Bread has made over the last six months and am truly thrilled and humbled by this prize from the Canadian Search Awards,” said SMC Principal Shelley McArthur-Everett. “Our team came together to rally support for our restaurant clients and the industry at large during an incredibly difficult time and it is an honour to see our efforts recognized by our peers as part of this prestigious industry awards program.”
To learn more about the Breaking Bread campaign, read our Case Study on the campaign development and visit breakingbreadnow.com for more information on how you can support Canada’s independent foodservice businesses.