Awards are great. Sustained growth is even better.

How Lebara won the Holistic Growth Story Award at The Marketing Society Global Awards 2026

I’ve always had a slightly conflicted relationship with awards ceremonies.

There have been years when I’ve felt fairly apathetic about them. There are a lot of awards, a lot of categories and, if we’re honest, occasionally a lot of people congratulating each other for work nobody outside the room has ever seen.

But I can’t lie. Winning is still a very good feeling. And getting people from across the industry into one room to celebrate genuinely effective work has real value.

This one hit a little differently.

Partly because my evening began with me changing into a tuxedo in the back of a black cab after a fairly heavy day of meetings. There are few things less elegant than trying to put on formal trousers while travelling across London. James Bond never had to contend with a sudden stop at Old Street.

IMAGE: Laurence changing into his tuxedo in the back of the cab

But mainly because this award wasn’t for a single advert or a short burst of activity. It was for growth.

Why The Marketing Society Global Awards matter

The Marketing Society Global Awards have been recognising marketing excellence for more than four decades. The 2026 awards were the 41st, judged by senior marketers and industry leaders who understand the difference between an impressive campaign and marketing that has made a sustained commercial difference.

Lebara’s entry, **The Smarter Growth Story**, was shortlisted for the **Holistic Growth Story Award** alongside work for Paddy Power, Sainsbury’s, easyJet holidays, Molson Coors and King Arthur Baking.

Not bad company to keep.

When AJ Coyne, Chief Marketing Officer at Monzo, announced Lebara as the winner, it felt particularly fitting. Monzo was one of the challenger brands we referenced more than once during the journey. It’s a business that grew by understanding what frustrated customers about an established category, then building the brand and experience around a smarter alternative.

There are obvious parallels with what Lebara set out to do in mobile.

The growth story behind the award

When this journey began, the UK mobile market was mature and largely stagnant. Everyone already had a mobile phone. Growth couldn’t come from waiting for the category to expand, so Lebara had to take market share from much larger competitors with much deeper pockets.

And we had to do it with comparatively limited resources.

There were no shortcuts and no single silver bullet. The team agreed a plan and stuck to it. Customer insight, positioning, brand, creative, media, data, CRM and customer experience all worked towards the same commercial goal.

The opportunity came from understanding what people really wanted from a mobile network: reliable quality, good service and fair pricing. Lebara already performed strongly on value, but the brand needed to broaden beyond its traditional retail niche and persuade more UK consumers that choosing Lebara wasn’t a compromise. It was the smarter choice.

That thinking led to the positioning around **championing a smarter way to connect**, supported by marketing that was challenging, straightforward, democratic and light-hearted.

Rather than trying to imitate the spending or production conventions of the biggest mobile networks, the team made the budget constraint part of the strategy. The work was deliberately distinctive and tongue-in-cheek, with the creative and media focused firmly on customers of the major network operators.

And crucially, we didn’t change direction every six months.

The strategy was given time to work. Each year built on the last. Every lever was pulled in the same direction, from smarter acquisition and predictive modelling to brand building, CRM and the customer experience.

The results speak for themselves. Lebara became the UK’s fastest-growing mobile network, grew customer revenue fivefold across the wider growth journey and increased UK brand awareness by around eight to nine million people over an 18-month period. Consideration increased, marketing delivered a positive return on investment, and the business saw improvements in churn and customer lifetime value.

That’s what holistic growth actually means. Not doing lots of disconnected marketing activity, but connecting every part of marketing around one clear commercial task.

A team win, in every sense

It was great to celebrate the award with the talented team at Lebara and the agency partners who helped make the growth story possible: Effective Collective, Squadron Venture Media, The Specialist Works and Double W Worldwide.

Double W is proud to have played its part through the brand’s creative strategy and campaigns, working alongside specialists across insight, media, data and growth. But this wasn’t a story created by one agency, one discipline or one standout moment.

It came from a client and agency team making clear decisions, trusting the strategy and refusing to waver when the temptation to chase the next new thing inevitably appeared.

The awards were held at the Honourable Artillery Company in London, a venue whose history stretches back to a royal charter granted by Henry VIII in 1537. It’s a suitably grand place to collect an award, although the journey there in my case was rather less ceremonial.

By the end of the evening, the awkward tuxedo change felt worth it.

Awards are great. Sustained growth is even better. But every now and then, it’s good to stop, get the team together and celebrate both.

What did Lebara win at The Marketing Society Global Awards 2026?

Lebara won the Holistic Growth Story Award for **The Smarter Growth Story**, recognising how the business aligned brand, creative, media, data, CRM and customer experience to deliver sustained commercial growth in the highly competitive UK mobile market.

Who worked on Lebara’s award-winning growth strategy?

The winning entry brought together the marketing team at Lebara Mobile with Effective Collective, Double W Worldwide, Squadron Venture Media and The Specialist Works.

What can other challenger brands learn from Lebara’s growth?

The biggest lesson is consistency. Lebara used customer insight to identify a clear market opportunity, created a distinctive challenger positioning and aligned every marketing discipline behind it. The team kept improving the execution without constantly changing the strategy.