Area 23, an FCB Health network company, came out on top at the MM&M Awards for the second straight year, receiving three gold awards at Thursday night’s ceremony — the most gold prizes for any agency.

Three independent agencies — 2e Creative, Klick Health, and StoneArch — each won two gold awards. WPP Group’s Wunderman Health, too, won the top prize in two categories.

The annual MM&M Awards showcase the best in creativity and effectiveness in healthcare marketing, communications, and media. More than 900 industry leaders attended the event, which was held Thursday night at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.  

Leo Burnett, Periscope, and UnitedHealthcare won this year’s Titanium Award for Best in Show for The Ways In, the insurer’s first consumer advertising effort. The campaign used real medical codes, called ICD-10 codes, to show the humorous ways that people end up in a hospital or health system.  “It’s real, funny, and human,” one judge said. The campaign also took home the gold for Best Multichannel Campaign (Large budgets).

Area23, an Interpublic Group agency, won gold for three separate campaigns: Cooties Catcher for Purell as Best Health & Wellness Digital Initiative for Consumers, A Thousand Words About NTM for Insmed as Best Digital Initiative for Non-Consumers, and Be the Match for The National Bone Marrow Registry as Best Philanthropic Campaign.

One judge called Cooties Catcher, the campaign for hand sanitizer Purell, a “great experiential concept executed digitally.” The classroom experiment gave first graders in Brooklyn, New York, a visual experience of what germs live on their hands. Another gold-winning campaign, A Thousand Word About NTM, helped educate pulmonologists about a rare and often untreated disease: nontuberculous mycobacteria. The agency paired NTM patients with artists to help them communicate their difficult journeys to diagnosis. One judge said, “This is the best creative I’ve ever seen in pharma.” The winner for Best Philanthropic Campaign — Be the Match — included a laboratory booth at New York Comic Con to find bone-marrow donors. The initiative resulted in 500 registered donors to the National Bone Marrow Registry.

Indie agency 2e Creative won gold for Small Healthcare Agency of the Year and its disease education campaign, Your Kids, Their Germs, for Alcon Laboratories’ anti-infective portfolio. “It’s highly engaging and very topical and informative,” one judge said.

The gold awards for Best Agency Self-Promotion and Large Healthcare Agency of the Year went to Toronto-based Klick Health. The agency’s self-promotional effort, the Klick Ideas Exchange, brought together more than 160 healthcare executives in an event hosted before the BIO International Convention in Philadelphia in 2015. Speakers included President Bill Clinton and Dr. Eric Topol.

StoneArch won Best Multichannel Campaign (Small to Medium Product Size) for Through it All, an initiative for breastfeeding moms with company Medela. Judges said the social-media platform represented a “nice use of parents helping parents.” The agency also won gold for Best Branded Website for Consumers for its work with Medela.

Wunderman Health’s work for GlaxoSmithKline’s over-the-counter allergy nose spray Flonase won two golds: Best Product Launch and Best Use of Data/Analytics. One judge called the campaign “highly disruptive in a very cluttered category [that] achieved tremendous results.”

To read a full list of all the winners, click here.