AdTech Holding Recognized with Brandon Hall Group Gold HCM Excellence Award for Excellence in Best Business Strategy
We’re proud to share that AdTech Holding and its flagship advertising platform PropellerAds, have won a Gold Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award 2026 in the Best Business Strategy category, within the Future of Work program area.
The award recognizes our “AdTech Holding Becomes Strategy-First Organization” program, which we ran together with business strategy consultancy SOTA.
The Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards are decided by a panel of independent senior industry experts, analysts, and executives. They judge against a published evaluation framework rather than popularity or nomination alone.
That independent validation strengthens both our employer brand and the confidence our partners place in us, across AdTech Holding, SOTA, and PropellerAds.
About the Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards
For more than 30 years, the Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards have recognized organizations that turn workforce strategy into measurable business results.
The program is widely regarded as the Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.
What makes a Gold here worth having is how entries are judged. Brandon Hall Group describes the process this way: every submission is reviewed by a panel of veteran independent industry experts, its own analysts, and executives, against the same four published criteria:
- Alignment to the business need and environment
- Program design, functionality, and delivery
- Adoption, integration, user experience, innovation, and creativity
- Overall effectiveness, impact, and measurable benefits
In other words, recognition is earned on demonstrated results rather than on popularity or a nomination alone. A program has to show what it changed, not just that it happened.
The Winning Program
The winning entry, AdTech Holding Becomes Strategy-First Organization, reshaped how the company sets direction and turns strategy into everyday practice. We designed and delivered it alongside SOTA, whose expertise helped us build a working system that teams across the organization now use.
The results show up in how leaders read the strategy and work with it. In our leadership pulse survey, OKR effectiveness came in at 88%, and 94% of leaders said the strategy is clear to them.
Gold in this category recognizes that the way AdTech Holding is run, from how decisions get made to how strategy reaches the teams delivering on it, meets the standards this program measures against.
In Their Words
Brandon Hall Group put it this way when announcing the 2026 winners:
Every year, the HCM Excellence Awards® remind us that innovation is ultimately about impact. The organizations recognized this year have demonstrated that great HR and learning strategies don’t just improve programs; they strengthen organizations, empower people, and deliver measurable business results. We are honored to celebrate their achievements,
said Rachel Cooke, COO of Brandon Hall Group™ and HCM Excellence Awards® Program Leader.
Strategy only matters if it reaches the people doing the work. This award tells us the system we built with SOTA does exactly that, and that independent experts can see the difference it makes,
said Alex Vasekin, CEO of AdTech Holding.
What I value most is that this recognition is about how we work together, not a single project or moment. That’s the culture our teams show up and build every day,
said Elena Dolia, Chief Administrative Officer at AdTech Holding.
Looking Ahead
The Gold will be presented in person at the Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Conference on January 26 to 28, 2027. Winners walk across the stage during the Awards Ceremony to receive the trophy from Mike Cooke, Rachel Cooke, and Michael Rochelle.
An award like this belongs to a lot of people. Thank you to the teams across AdTech Holding who did the work, and to SOTA, whose partnership shaped the program from the start.
We take recognition like this as a checkpoint rather than a finish line. The strategy-first way of working is now part of how we operate, and we’ll keep building on it, for our people, for our projects, and for the partners who grow with us.
