The National Tyre Distributors Association (NTDA) held its annual conference along with dinner and tyre industry awards on 19th October at the Hilton Double Tree, Stadium MK, Milton Keynes. English actor, comedian and impressionist Jon Culshaw hosted the awards alongside NTDA Chief Executive Stefan Hay and National Chairman Simon Wright. Circa 640 guests gathered to celebrate the achievements within the tyre industry.
Hankook Tyre UK was awarded “Tyre Industry Environmental and Sustainable Solution of the Year” sponsored by The Lord Mountevens of Chelsea KStJ JP. NTDA CEO Stefan Hay said: “The judges felt that although one of five excellent finalists, Hankook’s entry, in particular, stood out because of the highly demonstrable progress it is now making towards improving its company-wide ESG standards, maintaining a sustainable supply chain, reducing all greenhouse gases generated from its raw material acquisition and its efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.”
Hankook was also awarded the Industry Marketing Campaign of the Year sponsored by The Tyre Group for its Facebook campaign entitled ‘Piece of Cake’ to coincide with TyreSafe’s Tyre Safety Month. Hankook commissioned @the_bakeking, a cake artist from the Netflix show ‘Extreme Cake Bakers’ to make a Hankook replica tyre – out of cake to create a mechanic to talk about tyre safety in a unique, thumb-stopping way. The campaign message highlighted that checking your tyres is super easy to do and vitally important for safety on the road.
“Hankook’s ‘Piece of Cake’ campaign launched to complement TyreSafe’s Tyre Safety Month, was ingenious and its clever use of social media and streaming services to ‘enhance’ the safety message delivered excellent results within its target campaign audience,” said Hay. “As with the Environmental and Sustainable Solution of the Year Award entry, this campaign just had the ‘star quality’ the judges were looking for and in both cases these were very well deserved wins.”
Paul Emery, Sales Director at Hankook Tyre UK added “Everyone at Hankook is absolutely delighted to have receive the two awards at this year’s event, and we really appreciate the recognition of our team’s commitment and dedication. We are a relatively small team, which means every contribution to the business has an impact and everyone is immensely proud to have gained this valuable recognition”.
In addition, Hankook presented the National Chairman’s award for Outstanding Contribution to the Tyre Industry to Roger Griggs, Communications Director of ETEL, in recognition of his many years working in the tyre industry.