Three Years of Award-Winning Work
YBM Agency Awards: The Work Behind 10 Recognitions
Four wins. One Silver. Five finalist and shortlist placements.
YBM was built to solve business problems that rarely fit neatly inside a single marketing channel.
A struggling campaign may begin with broken tracking. Poor lead quality may trace back to the website, the offer, or a service area drawn too broadly. Lost revenue often disappears somewhere between a form submission and the first sales call. Our work follows the problem wherever it leads—through strategy, paid media, social, websites, CRM, sales workflows, and automation.
Awards give that work a public record. Every entry must explain the problem, defend the decisions, and prove the outcome. Then an independent jury measures it against work from agencies across the country.
For a growing independent agency, that scrutiny matters.
"For an agency, awards are both PR and validation. They show that we can compete, keep pace with the industry, and produce strong results even with smaller budgets."
Since 2024, YBM has earned 10 US Agency Awards recognitions: four wins, one Silver, and five finalist or shortlist placements across AI, social media, PPC, local marketing, integrated campaigns, and agency performance.
Each year marked a new stage in the agency's growth. In 2024, we earned our first national award. In 2025, our work expanded across four categories. By 2026, YBM campaigns were reshaping revenue, lead quality, response time, sales workflows, and the way multi-location businesses operated.
2024: YBM's First National Win
YBM's first US Agency Awards win came in Best Use of AI in a Client Campaign.
The agency used ChatGPT to accelerate research into a local market and the people within it. The technology helped the team process more information and identify patterns quickly. Client knowledge and human judgment shaped the strategy that followed.
The judges praised the balance:
"Their recognition of the need to balance technological approaches with strong interpersonal client engagement demonstrates a deep understanding of effective marketing."
The campaign established an approach YBM would continue refining over the next three years: use technology to uncover better questions, make faster decisions, and clear away repetitive work so the team can concentrate on the business itself.
YBM also became a Best New Agency finalist in 2024. For a firm still building its name, the two recognitions offered early evidence that its work could stand beside campaigns from more established agencies.
2025: From One AI Campaign to Four Recognitions
A year later, YBM returned in four categories.
The agency won Best Social Media Campaign and became a finalist for Best PPC Campaign, Best Use of AI in a Client Campaign, and Best Small Agency of the Year.
The range reflected how quickly the work had expanded.
Building Organic Growth With Memes to Muscle
The winning social campaign, Memes to Muscle, began with a close study of fitness culture.
YBM analyzed more than 10,000 follower accounts to understand the audience's routines, interests, language, and sense of humor. Weekly creative sprints turned those findings into memes, human stories, and 3D content designed for the way people actually used each platform.
The team kept testing. Formats changed, ideas moved quickly, and entertainment earned attention before the brand asked for it.
- TikTok grew from zero to more than 90,000 followers
- Top video reached 27.9 million views, 2.5 million likes, and 766,000 shares
- Leading Reel reached 9.2 million views and generated 347,000 shares
Nearly every view came through organic distribution, and the campaign produced inbound leads without paid advertising.
The judges described it as:
"This exceptionally creative and data-savvy campaign combines 3D designs with human storytelling and clever meme-driven content."
Truck World: Finding the Truth Inside the Ad Account
Truck World presented a different problem.
Its Google Ads reports showed plenty of activity, yet the business was paying for passenger-vehicle searches, duplicate conversions, and services that did not match its priorities. The dashboard looked healthier than the sales pipeline.
YBM rebuilt the tracking, removed irrelevant traffic, separated campaigns by service and intent, and reviewed recorded calls to learn what happened after a prospect contacted the company. The team also introduced dispatcher scripts, connecting advertising decisions to the conversations that followed.
- Monthly waste fell by more than $800
- Total ad spend dropped by 50%
- Qualified calls grew from 15% to 75% of call volume
- 330 high-quality leads per month
- ROI improved by 50%
The work became a Best PPC Campaign finalist.
Preparing a Multi-Location System for Scale
The third 2025 recognition came from work with East Coast Granite and Cabinet Connect, two growing businesses operating across more than 24 locations in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
YBM used AI-assisted creative, automated reporting, local market data, and continuous performance feedback to coordinate marketing across the network. Creative turnaround fell from five days to five hours. The system generated more than 2,000 leads per month and reduced cost per lead by 75%.
That campaign became a Best Use of AI in a Client Campaign finalist.
YBM's fourth recognition of 2025 was a Best Small Agency of the Year finalist placement.
2026: The Work Moves Deeper Into the Business
In 2026, YBM earned its strongest awards result to date:
- Winner — Best Local Campaign
- Winner — Best Use of AI in a Client Campaign
- Silver — Best Small Agency of the Year
- Shortlisted — Best Marketing Campaign
Granite Depot Asheville: Fewer Leads, More Revenue
Granite Depot Asheville came to YBM after revenue had fallen to 20% of its usual level in a single quarter.
More than 35% of incoming leads lived outside the company's service area or lacked the required budget. A website change had removed the clearest route for customers to contact the showroom. Paid media continued bringing traffic while the organic foundation weakened underneath it.
YBM examined paid campaigns, organic traffic, the website, and lead flow together. The team restored direct contact options, rebuilt the advertising and content strategy around a 30-mile Asheville service area, and routed every inquiry into one CRM for consistent tracking and quality review.
Then came the decision that defined the campaign: YBM reduced paid media spend by 60% and deliberately accepted roughly 40% fewer leads.
- Revenue returned from 20% to 100% of baseline within 30 days
- Campaign ROI reached 11.4x
- Out-of-range leads fell from more than 35% to under 12%
- Direct contact submissions increased by 280%
- Conversion rose 5.2x
- Organic reach matched previous paid reach within three weeks
The campaign won Best Local Campaign.
"This campaign was built around a clear, high-impact strategy and executed with exceptional pace."
East Coast Granite, Cabinet Connect, and i-Sell: Closing the Gaps
Across more than 24 locations, the customer journey had developed seams.
Leads arrived through one platform. Sales conversations lived in phone calls and emails. Reporting drew information from four separate dashboards. Every handoff created another opportunity for time or context to disappear.
YBM connected creative production, campaign optimization, competitor research, reporting, and lead handling into one working system.
The lead-response workflow included i-Sell, created by YBM and developed with Happyverse. i-Sell initiates its first call to a new lead in under 15 seconds, asks the opening qualification questions, follows up when needed, and records the outcome and next step for the sales team.
- Lead-to-appointment rate increased by 294% (3.4% to 13.4%)
- Cost per lead fell by 62.5%
- ROAS reached 4.2x
- Qualified leads: 416 (Q1 2025) → 2,000 (Q1 2026)
- Conversions: 88 → 280
- Recovered 40+ hours of manual work each month
The campaign, Human Creativity. AI Precision., won Best Use of AI in a Client Campaign.
"AI can be successfully embedded across multiple stages of a campaign rather than used as a standalone tool."
The Team Behind the Campaigns
YBM also received Silver for Best Small Agency of the Year in 2026.
The recognition reflected how a 23-person remote team maintained a consistent standard across different disciplines. Shared audits, common performance goals, and close collaboration allowed the agency to trace problems across the full customer journey.
"The thoughtful approach to managing remote teams and maintaining quality through structured audits further reinforces a disciplined and effective operating model."
YBM and East Coast Granite and Cabinet Connect also earned a Best Marketing Campaign shortlist for Your Neighbors in the Carolinas, bringing the agency's three-year total to 10 recognitions.
From Award Entries to the Judges' Table
In 2024, YBM earned its first national award by using AI to understand a local market more deeply.
In 2025, the agency showed that the same discipline could travel across organic social media, PPC, and multi-location marketing. By 2026, our work had reached deeper into the businesses themselves: where leads came from, how quickly someone responded, what sales knew, which numbers could be trusted, and where revenue was being lost.
Three years of that work brought YBM 10 industry recognitions.
It also brought Sofia Stannard to the other side of the process. In 2025, YBM's founder and CEO served as a Jay Chiat Awards juror in the Public Relations category for the 4As. In 2026, she is returning to the jury to evaluate another year of work from across the industry.
YBM has now prepared the entries, put its results before independent judges, collected the awards, and taken a seat at the judging table.
That perspective shapes the work we build for clients. A strong award case cannot be invented when the submission deadline arrives. It begins much earlier—with a difficult business problem, a sharp strategy, decisions that can withstand scrutiny, and results worth documenting.
Let's Build the Next Award-Winning Case Together
Bring YBM the business problem keeping you awake. We will trace it through the marketing, website, data, CRM, follow-up, and sales process; find what is holding growth back; and build the kind of work that changes the numbers and earns the industry's attention.
The next YBM award could have your company's name on it. Let's build the case together.
US Agency Awards 2025 — Winner