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- Trophies and sustainability
Case Study: MIA Awards 2026 — Trophies for the 15th Mediterranean Night of Marketing
Two formats, one folded-steel form. In this case study we follow the custom trophies we designed and manufactured for the MIA Awards 2026 of the Club de Marketing del Mediterráneo — from the origin of the commission to the decisions that defined them, and to the way a physical award shapes how a prize is perceived.
Table of Contents
The Commission
The MIA Awards are presented each year by the Club de Marketing del Mediterráneo of the Comunitat Valenciana. The 2026 edition — the fifteenth — was held on June 10 at the Huerto de Santa María in Valencia, before more than 320 guests.
They honor measurable marketing results rather than ideas alone — business growth, brand transformation, social impact, or product innovation — across seven categories that reach from companies to individual professionals and, this edition, emerging young talent.
The 2026 winners:
- Innovation — Zink Medical
- Social Marketing — Asindown
- B2B Marketing — Emuca
- B2C Marketing — Verdú Artesanos
- Best MIA Award of the Year — Verdú Artesanos
- Professional of the Year — Laura Oro, Norauto
- Special Recognition, young talent — Carmen Calero, Eduarda Prado, and Adrián Ramírez
Its 2026 theme, "Sentir el (im)pulso", cast marketing as a human pulse at a moment when artificial intelligence and automation dominate the sector's conversation. Our commission was to translate that pulse into an object: a custom trophy identifiable as the MIA Awards at a glance and built to be reissued edition after edition.
The Design Challenge
The difficulty was set by the trophy the MIA Awards had used before — a marble base topped by a chromed folded-steel sheet — a form whose essence and volume the brief asked us to keep while moving it into a contemporary, timeless language.
The real engineering problem sat in the steel sheet itself: resolving its metal development so that it produced the pyramidal geometry we had drawn. Hardest of all was the top face, which had to be oriented so the name of the award reads clearly from any direction around the table, not only head-on.
We worked through the award design with designer Laura Talaya across several rounds and a series of paper prototypes. Once we understood how the fold behaved, the definitive solution came quickly, and two formats — coherent with each other yet differentiated in scale — emerged from the same language.
From commission to object, made to measure.
Explore what we can create for your ceremony.
Request your custom trophyThe Making
We manufactured the collection in steel with recycled content, finished in water-based non-toxic paint in a matte corporate lilac. Its graphics were applied with DTF transfers, a printing method that marks folds and awkward geometries where conventional techniques fail because they require a completely flat, stable surface.
The geometry is a triangular-based pyramid cut horizontally at its mid-section, with the upper volume displaced laterally from the lower body — the break of planes that gives the trophy its silhouette.
The key decisions were resolved in sequence:
- Front face: the name of the event and the year, set in sans-serif type
- Base: the CMM logo alongside the award category
The two formats, drawn from a single language, separate cleanly by scale:
- Winner: roughly 15 cm tall, about 200 g
- Special Recognition: roughly 12.5 cm tall, about 130 g
Both are deliberately light objects, sized to be lifted on stage and carried home.
The Object
What remained in each winner's hands was a single form in two sizes, built to be issued again across the editions that follow rather than to mark one night alone.
On an evening whose whole argument was the human pulse behind marketing, the object had to hold that idea in steel: clean planes, live edges, and a name legible from any direction.
When the room has emptied and the pulse of the night has passed, the trophy is what stays behind to tell it. That standard — the reason this case study begins with the event and not the object — is the one we hold every custom trophy to.
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