The Royal Wedding and T-Mobile’s parody of Kate and Will’s nuptials topped the 2011 best campaigns list in last week’s PR Week but they didn’t make our top five.

Now, before you start thinking I’m bonkers, I accept all of the campaigns making the list: The Royal Wedding, The T-Mobile Royal Wedding, The Arab Spring, The Occupy Movement and The Royal British Legion had the ingredients of a successful campaign: clear objectives, strong strategy, creativity, a decent budget and mutual trust between the client and agency but the team here had different ideas as what was last year’s best campaign.

When canvassed, only Matt in the team mentioned the monarchy (and as you’ll see he was biased), so what did we rate as the best campaign of 2012?

1/ Becky’s favourite integrated PR campaign: Punter’s go Gaga for new ice cream craze
The Baby Gaga campaign was certainly something that made us stop in our tracks last year.

At the heart of the campaign was Baby Gaga – the world’s first ice cream made from breast milk.

The campaign achieved coverage across National TV, Radio and Print and during the launch week it was the fifth most popular story on the BBC’s website for seven days.

The campaign even caused more controversy – and media frenzy – when Lady Gaga’s management team contacted The Icecreamists threatening legal action!

2/ Adam’s favourite social media campaign: Colonel’s campaign to select scholarship winner
One of the most powerful social media campaigns of last year was KFC’s scholarship tweet campaign.

The fast food giant competition to award a $20,000 university scholarship based on a single tweet received over 2,800 entries on Tweeter.

The winning tweet came from 17-year-old student Amanda Russell, from Colorado who tweeted: ‘Hey Colonel! Your scholarship’s the secret ingredient missing from my recipe for success!

The campaign proved successful for KFC, generating more than nine million social media impressions and 20% more Twitter followers in a fortnight.

3/ Steph’s favourite advertising campaign: Old Spice is now the New Spice
Launched in the UK in May last year, the campaign kicked off with the award winning TV advert ‘Smell Like a Man, Man’, featuring former NFL player Isaiah Mustafa, in an attempt to attracted a younger male audience.

Following on from the success of the TV advertising campaign, the Old Spice’s Man Tour took to the streets of the UK with a branded ice cream van and horse lorry. Fans could emulate Mustafa by posing on a white horse, as well as testing out some of the company’s products.

The stops on the tour were chosen via a poll of 76,900 Facebook fans and included universities and city centres, before concluding in Liverpool on October 24

 4/ Ed’s favourite stunt: Lego lights up St Pancras with festive feat
Lego is responsible for some of the greatest stunts – who could forget the recreation of the Royal Wedding at Legoland or the inspired Lego interpretations of some iconic album artwork including Nivarna’s Nevermind and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe.

Continuing the trend, Lego’s Christmas offering was no exception. The toy company partnered up with London St Pancras to create the worlds largest Christmas tree made entirely of Lego bricks, which was displayed in the terminal over the Yuletide period.

The 12 foot, record-breaking attempt was built from more than 600,000 bricks and took over two months to create.

5/ Matt’s favourite Lava campaign:  Prince’s Trust Bedroom2Boardroom event
In September 2011, The Prince’s Trust wanted to create and run a large-scale event in Nottingham to raise awareness of their brand and approached Lava for help.

With only six weeks to design and promote the event, Lava handled everything from sourcing the location and speakers, the branding and identity, running order, a large scale, multi-channel promotional campaign (PR, Advertising, Social Media and Partner Relations) and delegate recruitment.

On 22 November, 200 young people attended Bedroom2Boardroom and were inspired by Richard Reed of Innocent Drinks, Fraser Doherty of SuperJam and Alexander Amosu, creator of the world’s most expensive Blackberry. They also gained help and advice from a number of experts who led breakout sessions to complement the keynote addresses. The event was a fantastic success, with the vast majority of the people who attended rating the event as excellent and saying they would contact The Prince’s Trust  for more information.

Of course we’re always on the look out to emulate the success of campaigns like our work for The Prince Trust. If you’re interested to find out how we could help tell your story why not drop me a line at [email protected].