Weber Shandwick leads the way with 26 Gold and Silver SABRE nominations for public relations campaigns in The Holmes Group’s 2011 North American awards competition, ahead of rivals Edelman (23 nominations), Ketchum (16 nominations), Cohn & Wolfe (14) and MSLGroup (10). And all five of those firms can also celebrate the fact that they are among the winners of the Bronze and Iron SABRE Awards, which are presented for exceptional content and agency management respectively. The SABRE Awards will be presented at our annual awards dinner, which will take place on May 10 at New York’s Cipriani 42nd Street. Tickets and tables can be reserved by calling or e-mailing Celeste Picco (212 333 2300). The finalists were chosen from close to 2,000 entries submitted this year, and represent some of the strongest programming in the history of the competition. According to Paul Holmes, editor of The Holmes Report and chairman of the SABRE judges: “The quality of the work this year was the highest we have ever seen. The integration of social media with traditional channels is increasingly seamless. There is more attention to research and evaluation than ever before. And we saw lots of big creative ideas. The result was a lot of deserving winners, and a lot of runners-up that probably would have been deserving winners in any other year.” Among the Bronze and Iron winners, a couple of firms will be picking up two trophies on May 10: Carmichael Lynch Spong and RF | Binder. Among the Gold and Silver finalists, there were multiple nominations for GolinHarris (9); RF | Binder (6); Burson-Marsteller, Coyne PR, MWW Group, and Ogilvy Public Relations (5 each); Carmichael Lynch Spong, FD, Fleishman-Hillard, Hill & Knowlton, and Zeno Group (4 each); and DeVries PR, French/West/Vaughn, Porter Novelli and Schwartz Communications (3 each); along with close to two dozen firms that scored two nominations apiece. There were also plenty of corporate entrants—companies that submitted without agencies—among our finalists, including campaigns from Cisco, GE, General Motors, Mars, Pfizer, and Stonyfield Farms.