How TUI’s Sand Shaker won Campaign of the Year

Most promotional merchandise is a compromise. It looks like the brand. It fits the budget. It survives the awards photo. Then it sits in a drawer.

The TUI Sand Shaker did something rarer. It solved a holiday problem that families already had, and it did it in a way the industry could see, share and vote for.

On 21 January 2026, at the BPMA Awards Dinner at the CBS Arena in Coventry, it won Distributor Marketing Campaign of the Year. Six hundred guests. Seventeen awards. A room that still votes for the work it respects.

That last part matters. These are not vanity gongs. The BPMA Annual Awards are voted for by the supply chain. When a campaign wins here, distributors and suppliers are saying: this is merch doing the job properly.

The problem was not “we need a giveaway”

Sand is a small problem until it is in the hotel room, the hire car, and the suitcase you unpack at 11pm. Anyone who has taken children to the beach knows the rest.

Prominate, working with TUI’s PR team, started from that irritation rather than from a catalogue page. TUI’s 11 August 2025 newsroom release said almost three quarters (74%) of people it surveyed longed for a more convenient way to banish the sand. We have not seen the survey methodology. Treat it as TUI-reported, not independently audited.

The brief, as the BPMA winning entry tells it, was genuine functionality and fun: brand awareness and brand love, not another towel that nobody needed. The UK business that entered as Prominate adopted the trading name The 1947 on 8 June 2026, five months after the awards dinner.

What they actually made

TUI called it a prototype: a tremor-technology platform you step on, beach-tested in summer 2025, to shake sand out of clothes and kit in a few seconds. That is TUI’s own wording. It is merch that does a job where the sand actually is. It is not a desk toy shipped to people who did not ask for one.

That is the whole trick, and it is easy to miss if you only look at the award photo.

Why the industry voted for it

There is a fashion, in this trade, for calling every activation “innovative”. Most of it is a colourway.

The Sand Shaker is simpler than that. Families already wanted the problem gone. TUI already owned the beach-holiday relationship. Prominate already knew how to turn a brand idea into an object people would actually use.

Mike Oxley, then speaking as CEO of Prominate, put the wider point well in Merch Magazine’s March 2026 “Power Up” feature. Neither line below is a Sand Shaker quote. Both are about merch in general. They still explain why a useful platform beat another giveaway.

It’s the only piece of advertising that makes people feel happy to receive it. Generally advertising is viewed in a negative way to the extent that people now block it. But people are generally delighted to receive merchandise.

When it’s well targeted and hitting the fans of a brand, merchandise is incredible. The power of what we do as an industry is massively underestimated.

What to steal for the next brief

If you are briefing a 2026 corporate or consumer programme, the Sand Shaker is a better model than another premium bottle. Ask these five questions before anyone opens a catalogue:

1. What is the actual inconvenience? If you cannot name it in a sentence, you do not have a product yet.
2. Where does that inconvenience happen? A resort, a warehouse, an event exit, a new starter’s first Monday. Location decides format.
3. Would they still want it without the logo? If the answer is no, it is decoration.
4. Can the brand honestly own the solution? TUI and beach sand is a clean fit. Forcing a clever object onto the wrong brand is how campaigns feel try-hard.
5. Will the supply chain respect it? If you cannot explain why a distributor would vote for this, it is probably still junk with a better unboxing.

None of that needs a Grand Prix budget. It needs a better brief.

Useful is the strategy

The awards night will move on. The next Merchandise World will have a new roll of honour. What should not move on is the standard this win sets.

Merchandise earns its keep when it is the thing people are happy to receive, happy to use, and happy to remember. The Sand Shaker is a sand-shaker. That sounds obvious. It is also why it won.

If your next campaign cannot pass that test, it is not a campaign. It is a giveaway with a press release.