Awards

Background and Marketing Challenge/Objectives

• Identify the key business challenge, market and competitive insights that led to this campaign. Could also be driven by an internal business challenge.
• Clarify if this campaign was a new initiative or an extension of a previous program.
• What were the quantifiable core business objectives (ex: "generate a lift of 2% in gross sales")?
• Provide KPI’s that support the business challenge that this campaign set out to address.
• What were the campaign specific communication objectives (ex: "generate an increase in brand awareness of 5% points etc.)?
• Include any key market and competitive insights. 

 

Creative Idea & Execution

• How did your strategy manifest into a creative look and feel?
• What was the inspiration behind the creative idea (can be tied to insights)?
• How did you leverage the many platform/media options to further amplify your creative product? And how did the creative idea manifest itself across various channels?
• What made it stand out and be noticed by your target?

 

Strategy/Insights

• What was the strategic impetus and key consumer insight that shaped the campaign's direction?
• What problem were you trying to solve and how did this strategic insight shape this campaign?
• What was unique and different about your approach?
• Who was the core target market/audience?
• What behaviour or attitude were you trying to invoke?
• Research, insights, statistics, and any data supporting the strategy are key.

 

Results

• Confirm how your campaign performed against the numbers provided in the objectives section in Question 1. Did you reach your objectives?
• Identify KPIs (key performance indicators) that proved your marketing initiative delivered a positive business impact for the advertiser.
• Understanding that some results are confidential, try to provide at minimum, comparisons like industry benchmarks, past results from the company, showing growth % etc.

Automotive

Product and services include:

• Manufacturers
• Dealers
• Aftermarket
• Automotive services

 

Business

B2B product and services include:

• Information technologies (ex: hardware, software and networking system infrastructure)
• Transportation
• Delivery
• Professional services (ex. real estate, legal, etc.)
• Business self–promotion (a company promoting to other businesses)

 

Consumer Products & Services

Products intended for:

• Personal care
• For use in the home
• These can include consumer goods, books, electronics, beauty products, consumer devices/software, sports/leisure equipment, clothing
• Entertainment services, cable, media, mobile, internet (not in a retail environment)

*Excluding F&B, automotive, financial and health care products. Refer to these categories.

Financial

All financial product and services from financial institutions and include programs developed around:

• Lead generation
• Traffic building
• Customer service
• Order generation
• Database building
• Retention or acquisition

These can include all banking services, credit (cards), insurance, investment, new products, and wealth management.

Food and Beverage

Products intended for:

• Consumer consumption

*Excluding products for health care, personal care or for the home.

Healthcare

Products (OTC included) and/or services intended for maintenance and improvement of physical and mental health campaigns supporting pharmaceutical, health & wellness clinics/centres and hospitals.

Retail/Consumer Businesses

Initiated by:

• Retailers (off-line and online) including restaurants, gyms, and automotive retailers
• Dealers
• Distributors, delivery services
• Manufacturers
• Food services stores to build traffic and sales

These include catalogue and e–commerce websites and other interactive methods that include product information and ordering devices.

Social Causes

This includes:

• NGO
• PSAs
• Charities
• Fund-raising
• Causes
• Foundations

Associations, government, public sector supporting a specific social cause.

Brand Building

Long-term marketing initiatives that drive brand health including awareness, perception, consumer behaviours, and attitudes. Campaigns should be in-market for a minimum of four months.

Note: Short term campaigns should be submitted under Business/Brand Impact discipline.

Success is defined by:

• Achieving excellence in creativity and strategy, with the ability to show positive long-term business results based on stated objectives and KPIs. Results provided can vary (ex: sales, brand lift, measured insights, results and media).
• Great campaigns can also showcase a range of media and technology: digital, social, broadcast, out-of-home, print, as well as direct (not mandatory).
• Campaign can be a product launch or traditional brand category.

Business/Brand Impact

Short term campaigns play a vital role in the success of building business through activating a rapid consumer response. As compared with “Brand Building”, these efforts are designed to generate immediate outcomes, within one day to four months in market.

These campaigns should demonstrate:

• Seasonal or tactical advertising
• The ability to drive positive outcomes as stated by the client’s objectives including increase in sales, web or store traffic, event participation or rapid change in consumer behavior, increase in acquisition (which may include e-commerce success), conversation rates, retention and leads.
• Provide as many KPI results as possible.
• An insightful, creative, or innovative means of reaching the consumer in any form(s) of media including broadcast, social, digital, print, OOH, or direct.

Customer Experience & Shopper Marketing

CX and shopper marketing drives sales and builds brand equity with customers using a number of channels and tactics throughout the relationship. These initiatives can be online or off-line and include:

• sweepstakes or contests
• online couponing
• digital engagement
• event activations
• gifts with purchase (gwp)
• loyalty rewards
• retail and in–store activity
• e-commerce and online activity
• packaging
• sampling
• partnerships

Shopper marketing encompasses successful marketing campaigns with customers sometime throughout the shopper journey.

The campaign may focus on new customer acquisition or activity to drive repeat purchase and increased customer loyalty or improve an existing customer experience/journey.

Engagement

Engagement is about the dialogue between brands and people – B2B, B2C, partners or employees. To manage long term relationships (quarterly or annually) or lifetime value driven (as opposed to one off tactics), the dialogue can use personalization, experiential techniques, content driven or target a community.

Social media is used to spark continued exposure (earned media, impressions, and interactions) with:

• current news items
• public interest topics
• influencer marketing
• product promotions or organizational updates

Programs with a CRM or 1:1 focus on specific moments in the customer lifecycle such as:

• acquisition
• welcome/activation
• cross-sell/upsell
• retention or win-back rate; or entire customer lifecycle management journeys

Innovative Media

Winning campaigns that successfully use marketing to reimagine how customers interact with brands, in the way that media is harnessed to effectively communicate to consumers. These campaigns:

• live beyond "the moment
• lay the groundwork for new media applications and approaches
• will represent innovation within existing media channels or in emerging platforms
• drive strong measurable business results

Entries needs to outline how innovative media helped achieve the strategy. They use creative solutions and innovative media technologies to effectively influence or engage their target audiences and demonstrate how tech drove results. Successful submissions will represent innovation within media channels showing strong metrics supporting business KPI’s. Strong entries will show innovation beyond the client brief or pivots from the traditional brand norms.

Public Relations (NEW)

Public Relations is a critical marketing practice of skillfully communicating an organization, individual or program’s message, using a variety of earned, owned, paid and shared tactics, to build mutually beneficial relationships with the public. A public relations strategy could include media campaigns, events, social media and stakeholder communications, among other activities.

Campaigns can be identified as internal or external. Entries can be further categorized in two investment classifications:

• Campaign budgets between $0 - $50,000
• Campaign budgets over $50,000

Entries can cover many areas including:

• Crisis management 
• Corporate social responsibility
• Brand development 
• Community relations 
• Media relations 
• Government relations 
• Influencer campaigns