News & Updates

Recap: ZMS Partner Awards 2023

The ZMS Partner Awards honors the best of the best when it comes to marketing campaigns on Zalando!

The ZMS Partner Awards in general has been realized to give our brand partners a platform to present their achievements of the past year. This creates a meaningful platform for partners to inspire others and keep on doing what they’re doing – or even bring it to the next level. This year for The ZMS Partner Awards 2023, we added a brand new category for campaigns that leveraged our self-service tooling such as the ZMS Ad Manager or Collabary.

So without further ado, let us present our third edition of the ZMS Partner Awards.

After Movie: ZMS Partner Awards Event 2023

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Three Categories of Excellence

We got so many applications for the ZMS Partner Award, making it very difficult to choose winners when the standard of campaigns was so high. Luckily the award was split into three categories:

Seasonal & Category,
Creative & Storytelling,
and our brand new category for Self-Service Campaigns.

That means there were three overall winning brands out of nine nominees! The Seasonal Category for campaigns that celebrated special moments of the year like the holiday season or peak traffic moments like Cyber Week. The Creative & Storytelling Category for campaigns that showcased exciting creativity and excellent storytelling. And last but definitely not least is our newest category, the Self-Service Category for campaigns that leveraged our self-service toolings such as the ZMS Ad Manager or Collabary.

Nevertheless, choosing wasn’t easy. It took five hard-working jury members to review and score all campaign entries, in order to choose the nominees and winners. Let us introduce you to our jury:

Meet the Jury

Diana Berte

VP Commercial at ZMS

Sara Spannar

VP Global Marketing at Zalando

Ignacio “Nacho” Royo Hernandez

Director Brand Consultancy at Zalando

Jens Bargmann

Director Marketing Strategy & Operations at ZMS

Heike Lari

Director Partner Management at ZMS

Who were the winners?

Drum roll, please…

Seasonal & Category Campaigns

Our three finalists in the Seasonal Category were Estée Lauder Companies, ASICS and UGG.

Winner: Estée Lauder Companies

Estée Lauder Companies applied with its campaign “Unlock the Magic”. This campaign was launched around Cyber Week and Christmas 2022, key commercial moments in the year for Beauty. The goal was to highlight ELC’s products as tools of self-expression by highlighting non-conventional beauty and make-up communities. Achieving +59% sales vs. the previous year, all we can say is – Well done Estée Lauder Companies!

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Campaign Video: Unlock the Magic

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Creative & Storytelling Campaigns

Our three finalists in the Creative Category were GAP, QS by s.Oliver collaborating with the BVG, and Athleta.

Winner: QS by s.Oliver

QS wanted to present themselves in a playful and authentic way while communicating their core values: tolerance, diversity, positivity and joy. So they teamed up with the BVG, Berlin’s public transportation provider, who had just launched its new seat cover pattern “Patterns of Diversity”, an ode to the city’s diversity. Out of these patterns, QS by s.Oliver and the BVG created a capsule collection. The collection was sold exclusively on Zalando and in a pop-up store at Alexanderplatz, in Berlin. The campaign managed to generate 79% item sales solely from new customers. Congratulations QS!

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Campaign Video: Wear couldn't be more street

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Self-Service Campaigns

Our three finalists in the Self-Service Category were Purelei, MQ Marqet and Buratti.

Winner: MQ Marqet

MQ Marqet used self service to experiment with differing budgets. During the first month after doubling their investment, MQ’s sales grew by 61% and in one year their net sales in Germany increased by 340%.

“We learned that we could get even better budget pressure by merging several campaigns into one campaign and allocate budget on a market level. By doing so, we also minimize the risk of having our different campaigns competing with each other.”

Emelie Wallin, Business Lead, Marketplace & Expansion at MQ Marqet

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Campaign Content: MQ Marqet

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Impressions from our exclusive Partner Awards Event 2023

For our Awards 2023, we wanted to go bigger than we had before! We invited all Award applicants, other ZMS brand partners and their internals stakeholders to an exciting event, taking place in Berlin, at the end of September 2023. During the evening, we exclusively streamed the Award Show and revealed all winners in person, live on stage. After a three course dinner we gave everyone the opportunity to mingle, get together and honor all applicants, nominees and winners. Below you can see the after movie and some impressions of the evening.