Two-Time Marketing Agency of the Year
17 jul, 2026 | 5 min read
Most agencies enter awards and hear nothing back.
Some win once and call it a great year.
Manna has now won Marketing Agency of the Year at the Global Agency Awards two years in a row.
Berker Ildokuz, our Marketing Strategist, led the award submissions both times.
And this is what he actually thinks is behind it, not the polished version, the real one.
The Entry Is Not the Work. The Work Is the Work.
There is a temptation, when you enter an award, to make the submission sound more sophisticated than the reality.
Agencies do it all the time.
Big language. Impressive-sounding frameworks. Results dressed up to look like strategy.
Judges are not fooled.
What they are looking for is simple: did this agency do something that genuinely moved the needle for their client, and do they actually understand why it worked?
That second part is where most entries fall apart.
"I think after a couple of years of attending these kinds of awards, Manna understood market needs, what the judges want to see, and how to present it clearly. Of course, knowing/understanding these won't help if there are no actual improvements on the campaigns. So, it's a perfect balance between those two." — Berker Ildokuz, Marketing Strategist at Manna
Why Precision Beats Scale
The campaigns we submitted were not the biggest in the industry.
Manna is not a hundred-person agency with a hundred-person media budget.
What we are is precise.
Every campaign we run is built around a specific problem, a specific audience, and a specific idea of what success actually looks like for that client. Not impressions. Not clicks. The thing the client actually cares about at the end of the month.
That precision is hard to fake in a submission. Either the results back it up or they do not.
"Manna has a different client approach compared to the others. This lead Manna to build strong relationships with partners and understand their needs." — Berker Ildokuz, Marketing Strategist at Manna
Winning Twice Means Something Different
The first win is exciting.
The second win is clarifying.
It tells you that what you are doing is not a one-off. It is not luck or timing or a single campaign that happened to perform. It is the way you work.
For Berker, the second year was more meaningful because the bar was raised internally. Manna did not resubmit the same story. The team asked what had been achieved since then that was genuinely worth talking about, and built the entry around that.
That discipline, of constantly asking whether the work is getting better, is harder than it sounds inside a fast-moving agency.
"Continuously testing, creating and comparing is the key. Since Manna always try to improve, these results are inevitable." — Berker Ildokuz, Marketing Strategist at Manna
What This Means for 2026
The work does not stop here.
In 2026, Manna has been shortlisted at two major industry awards.
At the European Paid Media Awards, Manna is shortlisted in four categories: Paid Media Campaign of the Year, Paid Social Campaign of the Year, Lead Gen Campaign of the Year, and Best Use of Meta Ads.
At the European Agency Awards, Manna has been shortlisted for Best Marketing Campaign, Digital Agency of the Year, and Marketing Agency of the Year.
That is seven shortlists across two awards.
"Seven shortlists don't happen by accident. They happen when you refuse to cut corners, and that's the standard we're building the next chapter on." — Berker Ildokuz, Marketing Strategist at Manna
The answer keeps coming back to the same things: real results, real clients, and a way of working that does not cut corners when the pressure is on.
That is what we will keep building.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the Global Agency Awards?
The Global Agency Awards recognise the best-performing marketing and digital agencies worldwide across categories including campaign work, agency culture, and agency of the year.
- What is Manna?
Manna is a performance marketing and lead generation agency operating across Europe and North America. We work with partners in home improvement, healthcare, and consumer services to generate high-quality leads that convert into real sales.
- How does Manna approach performance marketing differently?
We build every campaign around what actually matters to the client at the end of the month, not vanity metrics. Precision, localisation, and a close partnership model are at the core of how we work.
Want to know what a performance-first approach could look like for your brand? Reach out at sales@wearemanna.io