An award I was not in the room for
Armada's crew were covering the 2026 CIMPA Awards Gala. I was off island burying my father, so when Creative Professional of the Year was announced Tonie Chisholm went up and accepted it for me.
The Cayman Islands Marketing Professionals Association puts on one conference and one awards gala a year, and between them they are the closest thing this island's marketing industry has to a full roll call. Agencies, in-house teams, media owners, freelancers. Everyone in the same room, once.
The 2026 edition ran over two days at Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman. Conference on Friday 17 April, built around a theme of Level Up: Marketing's New Formula. Awards gala the following night.
Armada was booked to capture both days. The shortlist had gone out in late March, and a few weeks before the event CIMPA asked me for a headshot to sit behind my name on the nominee slides.
I missed the whole thing. My father died, and the funeral fell on that weekend, so I was off island and nowhere near a marketing gala.
The crew ran it without me
That is the part worth writing down, because it is not a footnote.
Armada is one person with a crew built around each job, and the standard question a client is really asking is what happens when something goes wrong. Not a difficult shot. Something genuinely outside the plan. In this case the answer was that the crew turned up, ran the two days to the schedule, and delivered the coverage, and the client did not have to think about it.
Meanwhile Tonie Chisholm, who was producing with Armada at the time, walked up on my behalf and accepted the award. It is a strange and generous thing to ask of someone, and I am still grateful she did it.
Creative Professional of the Year
The category was Creative Professional of the Year, and it went to me.
It is a peer award. The people voting and judging are the marketing directors, agency heads and brand managers who commission this kind of work on this island, which is to say they are the people who already know what a rushed job looks like and what a considered one looks like. That is what gives it weight. It is not an award for a single film. It is the industry saying the body of work holds up.
What it changes
Not the way I work. The next brief still has to be shot properly.
What it does change is a conversation I have had for years. Working from a small island, there is always an unspoken question about whether local means a step down from what you would get commissioning off island. An award voted on by the very people making those commissioning decisions answers that without me having to make the argument myself.
The trophy caught up with me later. Somewhere in the rushes from that night there is footage of my own category being read out, shot by my own crew. I have not gone looking for it.