at the 55th Anvil Awards.
Media Wise Communications / Muse Books raced out into 2020 with a rare repeat of last year’s trophy haul with a gold and a platinum at the 55thAnvil Awards held at the historic Manila Hotel on February 28, 2020.
The gold and platinum Anvils were for the coffee-table book The Manila Jockey Club: The Front Runner that Media Wise produced for the Manila Jockey Club, Inc. for its 150th anniversary.
The Platinum Anvil, the rarest and most coveted of the Anvils, is given only to the cream of the year’s crop of Gold Anvil awardees.
Normally, just one or two are given by the awards body per year out of hundreds of entries. Media Wise’s platinum last year was for the award-winning coffee-table-book On the March: The Jesuits in the Philippines Since the Restoration.
The Front Runner chronicles the evolution of horse racing in the Philippines, as embodied in the 150-year history of the Manila Jockey Club. It celebrates a century and a half of local horse-racing history, nostalgia, and excitement.
The Front Runner captures in insightful text and beautiful images MJC’s run through Philippine history from being the favored pastime sport of the social elite more than 150 years ago to being the enduring, thrill-a-second populist sport that it is today.
Within its 300 pages, the book takes the reader through the history of horse racing in the Philippines, through two wars—the Philippine Revolution and World War II—and through the historic transfer of the hippodrome from San Lazaro, Manila to the modern race tracks of the newly built San Lazaro Leisure Park in Carmona, Cavite.
The Anvil Awards are given annually by the Public Relations Society of the Philippines to the best public-relations programs and individual practitioners of the year.
at the 55th Anvil Awards.
Media Wise’s The Front Runner bagged the Platinum Anvil in the PR Tools Publications category. Although a boutique publication house, Media Wise has won many awards in PR and publications from various prestigious award-giving bodies locally and abroad.
Manila Jockey Club president Alfonso Reyno III and Media Wise president Ramoncito Ocampo Cruz, together with their respective teams, received the gold and platinum trophies at this year’s Anvil awarding ceremonies.
“No such chronicle of horse-racing history has been produced before,” noted Attorney Reyno III. “The book captures the essence of how horse racing was born and kept alive in the Philippines over the course of 150 years, and how MJC played a central role in all that.”
The MJC book-project team led by MJC Director, Corporate Counsel & General Counsel, Atty. Ferdinand. A Domingo, MJC COO and VP for resource administration Attorney Peter G. Zagala, MJC VP for marketing Eduardo Ramirez de Arellano and MJC VP for MIS Carlos S. Tan.
Ocampo Cruz, the CEO and executive/creative director of Media Wise Communications, a many-time winner of the prestigious Anvil and Quill publication awards, said that producing The Front Runner showed how MJC “has evolved over time, and how it continues to innovate and gallop toward a rosier future through bold business strategies and strategic partnerships.”
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