The Strategic Global Awards 2026: Meet the Winners

17 April 2026

The Strategic Global Awards exist to name what the profession rarely names directly. Not effort. Not longevity. Not credentials collected over a career. Impact. The specific, demonstrable, evidence-based kind that changes organizations, shifts perceptions, builds something the profession didn’t have before.

Last night in Brussels Strategic presented the inaugural Strategic Global Awards to six winners who exemplify exactly that standard. Spanning five countries, three continents, and every major arena of strategic communication practice, this year’s honorees represent the profession at its most rigorous, most creative, and most consequential.

Here is what they did and why it matters.

Strategic Communication Leader of the Year Sponsored by the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE)

Winner: Ana Ruby Pista, Founder and CEO, ArdentComm – Philippines

In 1997, Ana Ruby Pista looked at the Philippine communications landscape and identified a gap that nobody else was moving to fill. Technology was booming. Tech companies needed PR. No agency in the country was dedicated to serving them. She founded Ardent Communications – ArdentComm – on that insight, and built it from a niche startup into one of the Philippines’ leading integrated communications firms, with more than 50 professionals and a client roster that has included Airbnb, Toyota, Disney, Chevron, and Alibaba Cloud.

That entrepreneurial story alone would be noteworthy. What earns Ana this award is what she built alongside the agency. She became the first Filipino ever elected as a director of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management – the leading international body for the profession, representing more than 360,000 practitioners worldwide. She has served on the board of the Public Relations Society of the Philippines across multiple terms, and currently serves as its President for 2026-2027. She founded the AI Centre of Excellence alongside ArdentComm. She has spoken at the World PR Forum in Chennai and served as a judge for the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

The judges recognized more than 25 years of sustained strategic leadership – a career built not just on growing a successful agency, but on consistently using that platform to advance the profession in the Philippines and internationally. The courage to build something new, sustain it through multiple economic and technological disruptions, and simultaneously invest in the broader field: that is the combination this award was designed to recognize. Ana demonstrates all of it.

Strategic Communication Team of the Year Sponsored by the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE)

Winner: Agency X – Houston, USA

Agency X was founded in 2019 by Ed Davis – who readers of this issue will also recognize as one of this year’s Strategic 26 honorees – with a clear premise: that genuinely global B2B communication requires more than a large agency footprint. It requires the ability to assemble the right capabilities for each client’s specific market context, blend data intelligence with creative execution, and deliver across geographies without losing strategic coherence.

That is what Agency X is built to do. Operating across key markets worldwide, the agency specializes in data-driven, transformation-led campaigns for companies looking to expand internationally – combining audience analytics, account-based marketing, brand strategy, and MarTech integration into programs designed to produce measurable commercial outcomes.

The judges recognized the team’s shared values and high standards as the foundation for everything the agency delivers – noting that their transparent structure, clear accountability, and consistent internal communication translated directly into stronger outcomes for clients. Maintaining that level of cohesion and impact across a large international footprint is no small operational achievement.

For a young agency – founded just seven years ago – the scale and quality of what Agency X has built is a genuine statement. This award recognizes both the team and the model.

Integrated Strategic Communication Campaign of the Year Sponsored by the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE)

Winner: An Garda Síochána – “99 Persons of Interest” Campaign

On November 23, 2023, Dublin experienced serious riots. Property was damaged. Violent disorder spread across the city center. The immediate challenge for An Garda Síochána – Ireland’s national police and security service – was a law enforcement one. But alongside the operational response, the Garda faced a communication challenge of equal complexity: how to mobilize public information at scale, quickly and ethically, to support a justice process in a highly politicized environment.

The “99 Persons of Interest” campaign was the answer. A public appeal, carefully designed and executed, that turned civic awareness into a direct catalyst for accountability. The campaign resulted in the identification and subsequent convictions of those involved in the riots.

The judges called it a rare example of creative thinking applied to the most sensitive of public safety missions. It is that. It is also a demonstration of what strategic communication can accomplish when it is treated as a core operational function rather than a support activity – when the people responsible for it have the authority, the capability, and the courage to deploy it decisively. This campaign is already a reference point for public sector communicators globally. It deserves to be studied widely.

Internal Communication Leader of the Year

Winner: Adesh Chetram, Group Head: Integrated Communications, Nedbank – South Africa

Nedbank is one of South Africa’s four largest banking groups, operating across a sector that has faced significant structural pressure over recent years. Leading integrated communications inside a major bank during a period of strategic repositioning – and doing it in a way that measurably improves both staff understanding and staff retention – requires a level of organizational intelligence and communication discipline that goes well beyond content production.

Adesh Chetram delivered exactly that. The judges were impressed by the considered sequencing of his engagement approach – the recognition that internal communication in a change program is not a series of announcements but a structured process of building understanding, managing anxiety, and sustaining trust over time. The results were measurable. Staff retention improved in a competitive and difficult environment. The repositioning landed.

Adesh also founded the Institute for Internal Communication Africa (IFICA) – building the first professional body dedicated to advancing internal communication practice across the African continent. Previously at Vodacom, he brought both corporate scale experience and genuine institutional commitment to the profession. As IFICA’s founding president, he has done for African IC what this award recognizes in his day job: built something the profession needed and didn’t have.

Internal Engagement Campaign of the Year

Winner: Greg Howe

The Internal Engagement Campaign of the Year went to Greg Howe for a campaign that the judges described as a masterclass in translating strategic intent into measurable business impact.

What distinguished this entry from others in the category was its discipline. The campaign was organized around clear objectives, actionable insights, and well-defined key messages – not as a communications checklist, but as a genuine operational framework. The structured “Action Framework” the team built connected planning, listening, and execution in a way that reduced noise, built trust, and ensured strong alignment between what the organization was trying to achieve and what employees actually heard and understood.

The results were significant: high participation, improved confidence, stronger organizational connection – and all of it delivered across a complex, global organization where the opportunity for misalignment is constant. The judges recognized this as exactly the kind of ethical, insight-led communication that the profession needs to demonstrate it can produce at scale. Effective rather than impressive. Coherent rather than creative. Built around what employees needed to know and do, not around what looked good in a campaign report.

Ethics-Driven Communication Leader of the Year Sponsored by The #PRethics Community

Winner: Kobi Hemaa Osisiadan-Bekoe, Director of Corporate Affairs, Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (GI-KACE) – Ghana

Kobi Hemaa Osisiadan-Bekoe built her career across two professional worlds that don’t often produce the same person. She spent more than a decade as a journalist and television presenter – hosting programs on TV Africa, Adom TV, GTV, Light TV, and Homebase TV, rising to Head of Television and Deputy Managing Director at broadcaster level. She carried that media intelligence into corporate communications when she joined Ghana Post as Head of Corporate Communications in 2018, and then into her current role as Director of Corporate Affairs at GI-KACE – where she became the first woman to hold a director position in the institution’s history.

The work that earned this award was specific and rigorous. Tasked with communicating a nationwide digital skills initiative in a politically sensitive environment, Kobi Hemaa developed a comprehensive Communication Ethics Framework – a structured approach that embedded governance, real-time responsiveness, and gender-sensitive communication into the delivery of a major public program. Transparency, neutrality, inclusivity, and accountability were not aspirational values in this framework. They were operational requirements, built into how the communication was designed and executed. The result strengthened public trust and institutional credibility in a context where both were genuinely at stake.

The judges recognized the work as a compelling model for ethical communication leadership in the public sector. It is that – and it is also a signal of what is possible when a communicator brings genuine professional infrastructure to bear on genuinely important work. The first Ghanaian member of the World Communication Forum, named among Ghana’s Top 10 Women in PR, and recognized as Public Sector Communication Personality of the Year in 2024: Kobi Hemaa is building a career-long record of doing communications that matters.

What These Awards Say

Six winners. Five countries. Healthcare, banking, policing, public sector digital infrastructure, internal change management. The breadth is deliberate.

Strategic communication does not live in one sector or one discipline. It does not belong to one geography or one career archetype. It belongs to anyone who treats communication as a tool for organizational and social consequence rather than a function that exists to produce content on schedule.

That is what these winners share. Not a job title. Not a credential. A standard.

The Strategic Global Awards will return in 2027. Nominations will open later this year. If you know someone who meets this standard – or if you meet it yourself – we want to hear from you.