Overview:

Club Pilsener and TBWA Uganda dominated the 2025 Silverback Awards, winning multiple accolades for their radio advert, "A Lesson in Ugandan Efficiency," and affirming their creative leadership in East Africa.

KAMPALA, Uganda — Club Pilsener, a brand from Nile Breweries Limited, and its creative partner, TBWA Uganda, were among the top winners at the 2025 Silverback Awards, Uganda’s premier platform celebrating advertising and marketing excellence. Their radio advertisement, “A Lesson in Ugandan Efficiency,” secured multiple accolades, affirming the brand’s creative influence in East African communications.

The radio advert earned a Silver award in the Radio category. It went on to dominate the Craft Awards, taking home Craft Gold and an additional Craft Certificate for Radio and Audio Crafts. The wins highlighted the campaign’s ingenious use of cultural nuance, which transformed a uniquely Ugandan communication behavior into powerful brand storytelling.

The award-winning campaign was built on a simple, relatable insight: Ugandans often use the single syllable “mm” as a highly efficient cultural shorthand to compress complex messages, expressing everything from suspicion to excitement. TBWA Uganda used this insight to position Club Shorty, a smaller-pack variant of Club Pilsener, as the perfect embodiment of “getting the same great outcome from less.”

For Nile Breweries, one of the country’s oldest and most influential brewers, the awards add to a legacy of using creativity to affirm its place as a champion of Ugandan culture and humor. The recognition validates the brewery’s continued investment in outstanding communication through its long-standing partnership with TBWA Uganda.

The Silverback Awards, organized by the Uganda Advertising Association (UAA) in partnership with the Loeries and the Uganda Marketers Society, are growing in prominence across East Africa. The awards are built on a mission to raise professional standards to global levels.

Speaking at the ceremony at Kampala Golf Course Hotel, Dr. Monica Musenero, the Minister for Science, Technology, and Innovation, applauded the role of creativity in shaping Uganda’s international identity. She noted that while Uganda is blessed with gifted minds, it struggles to project this brilliance globally. She emphasized that the event marked a shift in how the country approaches communication, especially in highlighting Africa’s scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Her remarks re-emphasized the belief that creatives have a critical responsibility to refine and amplify the continent’s most transformative stories. This viewpoint reflected a broader theme throughout the evening: creativity has evolved from a mere marketing tool to a national asset with significant economic and cultural influence.

UAA Chairman Jasi Rommel also reflected on the significance of the work celebrated, emphasizing the immense discipline, collaboration, and often unseen labor that go into producing a successful campaign. Rommel noted that the awards honor the “daily grind” behind creative output, reminding attendees that innovation usually begins in small, quiet moments.

For TBWA Uganda, the recognition marks another milestone in its mission to fuse local insight with creative strategy. The award-winning campaign, “A Lesson in Ugandan Efficiency 2,” exemplifies this balance, centered on distinctly Ugandan humor yet executed with a sharpness that meets global creative standards. The wins position Nile Breweries as a continued leader in brand communication, having embraced creativity as a key component of its identity.