Atlanta (Oct. 11, 2021) – Piedmont Chief Marketing Officer Douwe Bergsma on Oct. 6 received the AMY Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association’s Atlanta Chapter at its annual awards celebration, which was held at the Guardian Works. Each year, the AMY Awards recognize companies and individuals for their exceptional creativity, innovation and results in marketing campaign execution for the previous year.
Bergsma dedicated his Lifetime Achievement Award to all the health care heroes on the front lines and beyond, who keep our communities going.
“They deserve our respect and support, now more than ever,” Bergsma said.
The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes individuals who have made significant strides in their respective careers and within the Atlanta marketing community. An individual must demonstrate superior leadership within and outside the organization, and must have contributed his or her talent, leadership and vision to his or her organization and to the field of marketing.
The award comes as Piedmont is set to embark on a multimillion-dollar brand campaign on Oct. 29, 2021. It will be the nonprofit hospital system’s first brand campaign since 2012.
“I am honored to receive the AMY Lifetime Achieve Award and I want to dedicate it to all the incredible health care workers, on the front lines and beyond, who have been keeping all our communities going for over 19 challenging months,” said Bergsma, who also is on the Board of Directors for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the dean of the Brand Marketers Academy at the Cannes Lions School.
“Marketing is a science that helps to accelerate long-term brand-building and short-term brand activation and I would like to think that I have helped to advance it through the combination of strategy, creativity and analytics, both inside the organizations I have worked at and across the industry.”
Bergsma possesses more than 28 years of business experience. Prior to joining Piedmont, he spent almost nine years as chief marketing officer of Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products. While at Georgia-Pacific, Bergsma was responsible for accelerating brand value growth primarily through brand-building, design, consumer experience, and product and marketing innovation. He was its first chief marketing officer and was tasked with bringing a new consumer focus and (digital) transformation to the business.
Prior to working at Georgia-Pacific, Bergsma worked with Procter & Gamble (P&G) for more than 19 years, most notably in Shopper Marketing, a global capability he helped to create, and as the marketing director of Pringles North America, where he led a brand turnaround, as well as the pilots for a new P&G global agency model and a new media approach for the company.
Bergsma joined Piedmont in 2020, just before the start of the global pandemic and joined the board of Piedmont Newnan Hospital a few months later.
“Working in health care has been a new experience for me and it has been an extremely meaningful one,” he said. “Our front-line workers are true heroes and it has been an honor to support them during this time.”
In addition to an accomplished marketing career, Bergsma is a strong advocate of diversity and inclusion, evidenced by his support of #SeeHer, a global industrywide effort to portray women accurately in marketing, media, sports and entertainment. He has participated as a leader, speaker, initiative-pilot and proponent at many occasions.
Originally from the Netherlands, Bergsma is a graduate of the Faculty of Economics & Business at the University of Groningen.