Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Widely respected TV publicity vet Rebecca Marks was honored on Wednesday with the Ben Halpern Lifetime Achievement Award, recognized for her ongoing career as one of the most trusted communications execs in the biz.
Marks, who’s now the exec VP of publicity, communications and social media at Warner Bros. Television Group, previously held a lengthy tenure at NBC.
In awarding Marks the prize, TPEC noted that she “has hired, trained and served as a mentor to many of the top PR professionals currently working in the public relations industry.” Her credits include overseeing publicity efforts on series like “Saturday Night Live,” “The Voice,” “Friends,” “The Tonight Show,” “Abbott Elementary,” “The West Wing,” “Young Sheldon” and “Ted Lasso.” The Ben Halpern Lifetime Achievement Award is named after one of the founders of TPEC (the Television Publicity Executives Committee), which also handed out its second annual TPEC Awards on Thursday — recognizing some of the most successful television publicity campaigns of the year.
Winners included teams from 20th Television, Amazon MGM Studios, CBS Studios, Hulu, Lifetime, NBC, Paramount+ and Peacock. Also, for the first time, TPEC handed out a “Rising Star Award” for individuals “whose exemplary contributions to their PR team cements their future in the field”: Brandon Bassler (Lifetime), Tori Morris (Hallmark) and Jillian Santoro (Smithhouse Strategy). “For our second year, we saw an impressive selection of campaigns from our colleagues at studios, networks and viewing platforms,” said TPEC chair Wendy Zocks (who’s the founder of Wendy Zocks PR).
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