As OMD UK’s top strategist, Fox is a driver for innovation and change and has been named Media Planner of the Year for the second year running. At OMD UK, she oversees a 40-strong Connections Planning team, which focuses on audience-centric media planning for clients. Fox supports the agency’s blue-chip clients, including Barclays, McDonald’s and Channel 4 – the last of which OMD retained after the It’s a Sin broadcaster’s first media agency pitch in a decade.

Fox says that planning for 2021 was about capitalising and building on everything learnt across the previous 12 months. This meant acknowledging that everything can be improved, adapted, and evolved and moments of rapid change require rapid evolution with no-one winning by standing still. These rapid evolutions set the foundation for an ongoing period of extraordinary growth at OMD.

Judges said Fox was an inspiration to the industry, evolving the planning discipline for the modern campaign, and that she led with ‘empathy, gravitas, innovative planning and a mission to challenge the industry, whilst evolving representation across OMD to reach its own targets.’ They said: ‘This was a superb year for Vicky and the results speak for themselves.”

Shortlisted:

Richard Kirk, chief strategy officer, Zenith UK

Kirk’s achievements this year include delivering a big uplift in brand perceptions for a comparison site, developing a quantitative approach to effective reach and producing the insight that convinced a client to change their approach to advertising effectiveness. He also led Zenith’s ROI agenda, resulting in the agency being one of the first media shops accredited for effectiveness by The IPA.

Emma Withington, managing partner, head of planning, MG OMD

Withington was promoted to managing partner in April 2021 and sits on MG OMD’s steering group to lead the overall agency output. Her body of work over the past twelve months includes four pitch wins, multiple awards, a new planning team, 52 weekly planning forums and three judging panels.