Presenting at the 2025 CMA Awards
Huge thanks to David Pead for the invite to join his table at the Construction & Built Environment Marketing Network'sCMA Awards on Wednesday 8th December 2025. Now in their 25th year, the CMA Awards are the construction and built environment sector's own celebration of marketing excellence, and 2025's ceremony had a genuine refresh to it: 21 categories, an all client-side judging panel, and a new venue for the gala dinner.
That venue, 8 Northumberland, just off Trafalgar Square , turned out to be a brilliant choice. It was a proper industry night out, but nowhere near as stuffy as the usual Park Lane hotel ballroom circuit this sector defaults to. Plus it was super easy to get back to south west London on the last tube home, result.
I had the genuine pleasure of presenting the Best Online Platform award, which went to Catnic — a very deserved win. The judges called it "a well written entry that demonstrated a digital platform built and developed on clear objectives, TA insights and digital solutions that drove significant results," and having seen what the team behind Catnic.com have done — rebuilding it as a genuinely useful resource for specifiers, merchants and installers, complete with self-service tools and real-time lead capture rather than just a shopfront, it's hard to disagree. Congratulations to the whole team.
The night made it into this year's winners' brochure too, which marked a proper milestone: 25 years of the CMA Awards celebrating marketing excellence across construction and the built environment. I'm in the cover photo collage alongside some of the night's best moments, and you can find the Catnic write-up, judges' verdict and the presentation photo on page 16.
Evenings like this are as much about who's in the room as what's on stage, and this one didn't disappoint. It was great to catch up with familiar faces including David Ing, and — in one of those lovely full-circle moments the built environment sector throws up every so often — my very first construction PR bosses, Andy Cassie and Anna Hern, who hired me straight out of university back in January 2001.
Nights like this are precisely why I love the industry: construction marketing is a genuinely small, relationship-led world, and the best work happens when the people doing it actually know each other. If you're building out your own firm's presence in that world, from award entries to the marketing strategy behind them,that's exactly what I help construction firms with.
Thanks for reading
I’m Ayo and I’m a built environment marketing consultant who has worked with many construction firms both large and small. Contact me to talk about how we can get your digital marketing converting more ayo@abbasmarketing.com
