The first tip is to make sure that you give yourself plenty of time to work on your entry, check and re-check the deadline and give yourself enough time to submit a winning entry. Do your research, look at the last years winners and the judges comments, what made the entries stand out? Are there points that you can bear in mind when doing your submission? Consider investing in your entry, producing a successful awards entry can be very time consuming. If you don’t have the resource or expertise internally and the time to spend on producing the entry it might be worth working with an awards entry specialist. Make sure the results that you mention are tangible, if you’re talking about uplift or ROI quantify it, It’s important to back up any claims with statistical evidence. It also helps bring it to life for us judges and If you can include a client case study, endorsement goes a long way! Read and re-read the category criteria, it may sound simple – but make sure that you enter the right category! Look at the entry criteria and make sure that you can confidently tick all of the boxes. It’s all too obvious to judges when an entry has been shoehorned into a category. Also ensure that you include the relevant materials, if your submission mentions video or audio you need to include examples as this helps bring your submissions to life and make them more compelling. Don’t just fill your entry with sales and marketing jargon, make sure the entry is succinct, clear and easy to understand. make sure that you stick to the facts, don’t speculate or exaggerate – as judges we can always sense when something has been over inflated or just doesn’t seem right. Spend time on your submission, judging takes a long time – there is the pre-judging which each judge does individually before getting together for a day. We take our job seriously and take time reading and re-reading submissions ensuring that we’re scoring fairly. A well structured, well written piece of work always stands out and similarly you can tell when a submission has been rushed. Check and re-check your entry and then get colleagues that were not involved in the project to check the entry for you. Have you kept to the word count? Included all relevant materials? Does the entry come to life and reflect the personality of your client and your agency? It may sound obvious but look out for grammatical and spelling mistakes.
The Advisory Collective are judging the following industry awards this year.
Festival of Media Awards - http://festivalofmedia.com/fomg
The Drum Digital Advertising Awards - https://www.digitaladvertisingawards.com/
AOP Awards - https://www.ukaop.org/awards2020
The Wires - https://www.exchangewire.com/the-wires/