The Neptune Awards: Honoring Excellence in Boating Industry Marketing
Febraury 16, 2025 – The Neptune Awards celebrate the year’s best marketing work in the $230 billion recreational boating industry. This year our long-standing client Sea-Doo Watercraft won the category of ‘Best Long Video’ for Inspired by the Rider: Bri Andrassy, produced by LOOK Marketing. LOOK’s Tim McKercher and Tyler Fisher were tasked to inspire a new generation and often ignored demographic (women) to explore getting out on the water and fish. The video tells the story of how Bri Andrassy has been inspired by the women in her life to catch big fish and live a life full.
As part of the Miami International Boat Show, the Marine Marketers of America association hosts the Neptune Awards galla. The Neptunes celebrate the most creative and impactful marketing work of the year in the boating industry. As with any other awards show, the big award is saved for the end, the King Neptune. The King Neptune is the MMA’s version of ‘Best of Show’ recognizing ‘Best in Competition.” At the end of the night, as the confetti canyons fired, Sea-Doo claimed the Trident and the top honor for Bri’s ‘Inspired’ video and announced winner of the 2024 King Neptune award.
Telling Bri Andrassy’s Story: Inspiring a New Generation of Women Boaters
It was a sweet, full-circle moment for the LOOK team. While activating the Sea-Doo display at the 2019 iCast Trade Show in Orlando our team first met the ultra-passionate, well-spoken, and adventure driven Mrs. Andrassy. Soon after we added Bri to the Sea-Doo Ambassador roster to help promote the fledgling Fish Pro watercraft. And she’s been an instrumental part of that product’s acceptance and success. To be able to tell her story in the Sea-Doo ‘Inspired by’ video series was very special for our team.
The Creative Process: Crafting a Video with Heart and Impact
When LOOK was asked to produce Bri’s story we were on the tail end of celebrating the success of the first video of the ‘Inspired by’ series LOOK produced that featured Emmanual Williams (winner of the 2022 Neptune Award for Long Video and AAF Space Coast Best of Show). It would have been easy for the team to copy and paste the story board of Emmanual’s video for Bri’s yet that’s not doing it right. Emann’s video was ultra powerful both visually and through music scoring. While Bri is a bad ass, she is a women, a women with deep passion and a big heart.
Her video had to be a bit softer, and we had to incorporate how the women in her life were the greatest influencers regarding her love of fishing. Our strategy was to tell a story within a story. The video skeleton would show Bri living a typical (for her) Sea-Doo day, with her back story being told within the video to add the ‘meat’ and meaning to her story. The director’s goal was for the viewer to shed a tear and that is why interviewing Bri’s mother in her hometown in Ocean City, New Jersey was a necessity to bring it together.
As we began the final color corrections, and adding the legal copy and end tags, we knew we had a good one. Having won the Neptune for the Inspired by the Rider video with Emmanuel the year prior, we felt Bri’s video would resonate across a broader spectrum. Bri’s video is strong, yet different than Emmanual’s. Both videos positioned the Sea-Doo as the catalyst for both of them to live their best Sea-Doo lives, yet in different ways. Bri’s story resonates with men, women, and most importantly moms, dads, and little girls. Entering this video in the Neptune awards was part of our plan from conception.
A Winning Strategy: How LOOK Marketing Positioned the Campaign for Success
Yet great work doesn’t win awards alone. We’ve seen really good projects not win, coming in second to less ‘wow’ projects because they were not positioned and presented to win. LOOK Marketing has won nine Neptune Awards in five categories over the past nine years – from 11 total entries. That’s a good conversion rate.
We’re competitive in everything we do, and we want to win for our clients, brands, and us. LOOK treats entering awards the same as any marketing project we lead or support. We set the objective to win, then develop a strategy to position our project and work to win, followed by executing specific tactics to ensure the strategy is delivered and the objective is achieved. We build a game plan to win and do what it takes to ensure we win. That included an awards entry presentation built in a manner to highlight results and the smart and creative ways the project was executed to help the judges positively judge.
To win you must begin with a great ‘product’ and build a great story around that product. We see the next aspect of winning to be based on our approach to most of our services, specifically PR. Public Relations is earned media, and the art of persuading somebody to talk about and publicize your message and product to the masses, without being compensated. You could easily argue it parallels sales, they’re both selling. This art of persuasion includes strategic planning that should be included from the start. Know who your audience is and what moves them, then be there in the exact place, time, and manner you want them to see you. And keep blackening the fish until the trophy, or trident, is in your hands. A lot of metaphors in there. . .
The Power of Partnership: Celebrating Victory with Sea-Doo and BRP
The most important element for any project to win is to be led by people and brands who want to be the best. The Sea-Doo brand and the people leading it have been that for LOOK Marketing. You can only do winning work for people who are dedicated to being the best. BRP and the Sea-Doo team is more competitive than most and we love that. Thank you to the Sea-Doo team for trusting LOOK to tell the Sea-Doo story for so many years. Cheers to being a King Neptune Award Winner.
Special thanks goes to;
Alexandria Monti
James Ort
Olivia Easton
Eva-Rose Mercier
Alexandra Saumier
Tyler Fischer
Jeremy Schandelmayer
Mr. & Mrs. Andrassy
And the star and our inspiration, Bri Andrassy
