ANA Announces 2020 Multicultural Excellence Awards Grand Prize Winners

Verizon and its ad agency McCann Worldgroup received top honors, winning the Best in Show award in the 2020 ANA Multicultural Excellence Awards competition for the campaign “Love Calls Back.”

The campaign features a four-minute video with four members of the LGBTQ+ community reconnecting — and reconciling — in telephone calls with family members who originally rejected their sexual identity. The social media campaign ran across Verizon’s channels.

Now in their 20th year, the ANA Multicultural Excellence Awards recognize client-side marketers and their agency or media partners who produced multicultural advertising campaigns between June 2019 and June 2020. This year’s competition, open to both ANA members and nonmembers, received 300 entries, the largest number of entries in the awards’ history.

“ ‘Love Calls Back’ is an example of phenomenal storytelling grounded in Verizon’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in our creative,” said Verizon EVP and CMO Diego Scotti. “The work not only celebrates the LGBTQ+ community, but shows the impact of the connection our network provides — in these cases, life-changing re-connections. The Verizon and McCann teams did a wonderful job on this campaign and it is a true honor for it to be recognized in this way by the ANA.”

In addition to the “Best in Show” award, grand prize winners also were honored in 13 categories for industry-leading advertising. The 2020 grand prize brand and agency winners in each category were as follows:

The complete list of winners in the 2020 ANA Multicultural Excellence Awards competition, including category winners for the above, can be accessed here.

ABOUT THE ANA

The ANA’s (Association of National Advertisers) mission is to drive growth for marketing professionals, brands and businesses, the industry, and humanity. The ANA serves the marketing needs of 20,000 brands by leveraging the 12-point ANA Growth Agenda, which has been endorsed by the Global CMO Growth Council. The ANA’s membership consists of U.S. and international companies, including client-side marketers, nonprofits, fundraisers, and marketing solutions providers (data science and technology companies, ad agencies, publishers, media companies, suppliers, and vendors). The ANA creates Marketing Growth Champions by serving, educating, and advocating for more than 50,000 industry members that collectively invest more than $400 billion in marketing and advertising annually.