OV and U6 Student Unite to Win Industry Award

Thank you to OV Drew Benvie (K 85-96), who shared a story of a bid for a prestigious business industry award at his company, Battenhall, which involved the efforts of current U6 student, Pranav M.

Earlier in the year, Pranav approached Drew while he was exhibiting at one of the King’s Careers Extravaganza days. This ended up with Pranav applying for work experience at Battenhall, a process which was ultimately successful, seeing Pranav offered a week’s work experience at Battenhall in London over Easter.

“Pranav surprised us all,” said Drew about Pranav‘s time at Battenhall. “He was paired up with some of our recent university graduates, and given social media research assignments. But on his second day we noticed he was coding software programs that he thought could make our work more efficient. He did such a great job, we asked him to come back again over the summer, and he helped us turn the software into something that we would use every day.”

Drew’s clients loved hearing his story too, so much so that Battenhall decided to include the case study in their bid for the biggest industry award of the calendar year: PR Week Magazine’s Agency of the Year Awards. Pranav was even invited to join Drew and his colleagues as part of the presenting team to the PR Week judges in September, explaining first hand how a social media consultancy worked with young, emerging talent to develop innovative new products and services. Everyone remarked that they had never seen anything like this before, with awards presentations ordinarily being carried out only by the senior most employees of the companies shortlisted.

The fantastic news hot off the press is that, with Pranav’s help, Battenhall ultimately beat every other consultancy in the UK, and was named by PR Week on October 15th as the outright winner of their Specialist Consultancy of the Year award at the awards gala in London’s Park Lane. The judges remarked that “Battenhall is the most exciting consultancy in decades,” and Drew has also expressed his sincerest thanks to all at King’s who gave Pranav the time and support throughout the year.