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The question of how to win awards is often answered with: “Produce great work.” However, while it is true that you need to have a strong campaign in order to win an award, it cannot stand by itself. It is important to acknowledge that a large part of winning an award is driven by the way the campaign is presented and explained in an entry.
Judd Labarthe, executive planning director at marketing services agency G2 Germany, part of the Effie Worldwide Board and recently chairman of the judging panel at Gemas Effie Mena Awards, says: “If you just look at the campaign, you’ve got a sense of the idea and the way the idea has been implemented. But you don’t necessarily have [any sense] of what the campaign was trying to achieve, why their objectives were important, why it would be significant to achieve them… how different campaign elements were meant to work together, a sense of the communication model. That comes only from reading the Effie case that has been prepared.”
So in order to fill that trophy cabinet, it is important to create compelling entries.
Most award entries include a written case and a video that illustrates the campaign strategy. While requirements vary depending on the competition, most require an insight into how a campaign moved from the challenge to the results stage. David ­Porter, media director, Unilever MENA, who was on the judging panel at the 2011 Gemas Effies, says: “Unless we’ve got a clear set of goals, a big idea, a great action plan and fantastic results, there will be no point in entering, because it would not get through the judging process.”

FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. One of the basic steps agencies should take is to get familiar with the rules and adhere to them. “The thing I noticed this time around [at the Gemas Effies] – and this sounds really crass or critical, but it’s true – is that there were a lot of entries where the entrants had not read the rules,” says Porter. “I think if you’re spending a huge amount of time and money in awards, it’s quite important to get into the right category and to follow to the letter any instruction given in terms of the look, feel [and] size of your submission,” he says. “For instance, in most awards judging, if it says you can enter a video up to four minutes long, and you enter a video that is four minutes, 30 seconds long, the last 30 seconds will be cut off before the judges see it.”
Ronald Howes, regional managing director, GCC, Memac Ogilvy & Mather, says that, considering that judges have several entries to go through, it is essential to know how to put the information together to make the process easier. Putting things into context for the judges is of extreme importance. Labarthe adds that one of the quickest ways to lose an award is by assuming that the judges have the same knowledge of your marketplace and category as you do.
But there is a big difference between describing what you did, and defending or underlining the significance and intelligence of the decisions that were made for the campaign. For example, instead of only saying which communication channels were used, why the particular channels were chosen should also be explained.

STEP BY STEP. Entrants should clearly outline the objectives, the reasons behind them, how they were achieved and what they meant in terms of success or results. “Let’s say you wanted to increase market share by two points and in order to do that you needed to increase your sales by 15 percent year on year. In order to do that you thought you needed to increase your spontaneous brand awareness by 40 percent. That sort of builds the communication model that then creates [a way] through which the judges read the rest of the case,” says Labarthe. “Now we know that you wanted to increase your market share by two points, [but] you don’t have any context to put that in. Is two points a lot? Has your brand been growing, has your brand been declining, what’s a share point worth in your category? I’ve seen Gold Effies winners where the share increase was less than two points but if you tell me that the business or a category in which one tenth of a share climb is worth $100 million in business, well, then suddenly a less than two points share increase looks like a hell of a lot of money.”
According to Porter, depending on the competition, having an audio/visual aspect is very important. This is where the entry video comes in. “I used to have a very cynical view – coming from the media industry – that you couldn’t win a media award without great creative work. And I’m starting to understand what that’s about now, having just reviewed… 170+ entries, that it’s not necessarily the above-the-line advertising that makes an entry stand out, but there has to be something visual about it to stand out from a crowd that big. It could be just a great two- or three-minute explanation of the campaign. But without that, it gets increasingly difficult to stand out in competitions where there are more and more entries every year.” He adds that video is important for press ads too. They are more likely to stand out than just a written entry and the ad.
It is essential that the video does not simply repeat what the judges have read in the written case, in some cases word for word. Storytelling can separate a winning entry from a non-winning one.
According to Porter, entrants should get prior feedback from an outsider: a friend, a family member, or a colleague working on a different project. “If they understand what you are trying to tell them and are relatively convinced that what you are telling them actually happened, then the chances are pretty good that you’ll get a good reading from the Effie judges.”

HEAVY ON THE POCKET. Participating in an award can often be a costly affair for agencies. The entry fee per entry is at least $275 for the Effies, $305 for the Dubai Lynx, $320 for the Mena Cristals and $400 for the Cannes Lions. Besides that, agencies often invest a lot toward the entry videos. Sometimes the cost of entering the award and preparing material for the entry can be higher than the executional cost of the campaign itself.
Yet, it seems like agencies perceive the cost as worth it. “It depends how big your idea is and how committed you are to sharing it with people,” says Howes. “ If you’ve done justice to a great idea, then I don’t think that that’s expensive.”
But Labarthe says that an agency has to be prudent in the way it allocates its resources. “Obviously, it’s entertaining for the judges when you get a film that’s created in the style of a campaign and that itself stands out as a piece of creative work. We’re human beings, and it’s hard not to be influenced somewhat by that,” he says. But “On balance, it’s far more important [to have a] case film that is clear, clearly presents the communication model, and shows the judges how the communication actually worked.”
At the end of the day, the overall package is what matters, as Labarthe says: “An Effie entry is much like a convincing argument before a jury in a court of law. It has to hang together. It has got to be consistent.”

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