The countdown is on to our 2017 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, with the final deadline for entries just six weeks away on Friday 4 August, and our Early Bird deadline two weeks earlier on Friday 21 July.

In the lead-up to the closing date, we’ll be profiling some of last year’s winning entries, to give you some idea of the high standard of mobile-first campaigns and solutions that we’ve seen in the past, and what you can expect from this year’s crop of nominations.

The 2016 winner of Most Effective Entertainment Campaign or Solution was Twickets, a cross-platform ticket exchange built by digital transformation agency Future Platforms. Originally an internal agency R&D project, Twickets was expanded to enable music, sport and theatre fans to trade tickets at face value or lower, and has developed into a viable and ethical solution to the much-maligned secondary ticketing market.

The service now has almost half a million users in the UK and has secured exclusive partnerships with One Direction, Adele and Queens Park Rangers FC. It was also won enormous support from leading figures in the entertainment industry, with the board of investors including former chairman of EMI Music Tony Wadsworth, Crystal Palace FC chairman Steve Parish and Ian McAndrew, CEO of Wildlife Entertainment.

“Twickets was based on an actual user need that came out of a personal situation,” said Eddie Guevarra, sales and marketing manager at Future Platforms. “The idea of not being able to get hold of tickets to an event or concert is extremely frustrating – more so, when the industrialisation of ticket touting is at an all-time high and not looking likely to slow down either.

“We think it won because it is an actual solution to a real problem. Instead of being the common marketing campaign that tries to push a product, it actually responds to a need and addresses a real problem that music fans have. The award recognition it has received has also been a great morale booster to our team!”

Other winners from last year include Levi’s, Santander, OMD, Mindshare, Nimbletank, Paramount Pictures and Virgin Media. Entering this year’s Awards couldn’t be easier: just register here, choose the categories you wish to compete in, and upload your entries.

The winners will be announced in a lavish ceremony on 16 November at the Grange Tower Bridge Hotel in London, in what promises to be one of the highlights of the year for the mobile marketing industry. Check out pictures from last year’s Awards Ceremony here, and video from the event here.

We look forward to receiving your entries, and hope you’ll be joining us for the ceremony.