JUDGING PROCESS
Festival of Media Awards Judges 2009
The Festival of Media Awards recognise the very best creative and innovative use of media.
Unlike many agency focused awards, the Festival of Media Awards are open to entries from every media practitioner, whether agency, media owner, brand, production company, digital specialist or mobile specialist, recognising that in today’s multiplatform, multidisciplinary world a good idea is just as likely to be sourced from an online competition as from the strategy bunker at media agency HQ.
The Festival of Media Awards judging process works in two stages.
- The first round of judging sees an international group of over 30 judges take part in an online judging process, whittling down the overall entries into shortlists by category
- The second round of judging is completed through a physical judging day, where over 20 senior international industry figures take part in deliberation, on a category by category basis, to select winners for each of the entering categories.
It is the Festival’s policy that a minimum of 25% of the shortlisting judges move forward to the physical judging day, providing continuity between each round, whilst ensuring that that awards have a truly global footprint. It is also the Festival’s policy that 10% of judges from the previous year go on to judge the following year – in order to ensure that there is a valuable perspective and an annual quality benchmarking exercise to help the industry understand key areas of improvement.
In both rounds the judges are asked to judge each entry based on four criteria, weighted as follows:
- The marketing challenge and brand insight (25%)
- The consumer insight and communications strategy (25%)
- The creativity of the communication and activation and/or delivery (25%)
- The results (25%)
Marks are equally split across these four disciplines in order to reflect the importance of the different components required in today’s media world of creative, innovative and effective communications.
Marketing challenge and brand insight
Great communications must always begin with fantastic insight – otherwise your marketing is unfocused and untargeted. In this section the Festival of Media Awards judges will be looking for proof of the thinking / research that has been applied into analysing where a brand can create more value, how it can drive its sales or meet a market challenge.
Consumer insight and communications strategy
Once a marketing challenge or brand insight has been uncovered, great communication has to have a big idea in order to engage the consumer. In this section the Festival of Media Awards judges will be looking for examples of how the big idea has been developed based on insight into the consumer and how well it fits with the brand and the uncovered insight.
Creativity of communication and activation and / or delivery
Even the best ‘big idea’ will not flourish if it is not executed properly. In this section the Festival of Media Awards judges are looking for creativity in the execution of the big idea. How did the campaign create cut through? Was the message conveyed in the media used? How did entering company ensure that the big idea stood out against a cluttered market place? To be considered a winner, an entry must not only have been based on great insight, which in turn generated a great idea, but it has to be executed with a clearly thought out plan.
Results
Much of 2009 has been dominated by numbers, with media pitches increasingly driven by a spreadsheet based auctions. The Festival of Media Awards was created to reward creative, innovative and effective communications. In order to create and execute these ideas, campaigns must excel in their research, their planning and their execution, as much as in their final results, which of course have increased importance as ROI becomes more important to advertisers. However, the Festival of Media Awards, unlike many other awards, does not overweight the results element of an entry at the expense of the creativity and innovation that has been applied to the other parts of the process. We do however, recognise that great creativity and innovation is all for nothing if it is not effective, as such in this section of the judging the Festival of Media Awards judges will be looking for proof that all the good research, planning and execution that has gone before has reaped real rewards for the client, looking at both business results (sales lifts / sales units) and marketing measurement results (hits /impressions etc).
