How Judging Works

We receive Jury nominations from local Festival representatives and via network, agency and brand contacts. After nominations close, the selection process begins and enormous consideration is given to who's selected, to ensure a diverse range of views and lived experience.

Each piece of work is reviewed multiple times by our Awards team before it gets to the Jury. Please note we don’t tolerate scam work or work produced purely for the purpose of winning awards. By our definition this means work that hasn’t aired, didn’t run and maybe hadn’t been approved by the brand or client.

The CEO of the entrant company AND the CMO (or equivalent) of the commissioning brand must both approve all entries submitted. You will be asked to provide their contact details during submission. Once your entry has progressed through the processing stages, these executives will be contacted directly to verify the information is factually accurate. These approvals will happen in parallel with judging. Once we receive the approvals, you’re all set.

This is the first round of judging that takes place online, where Jury members review the entries individually, before on-site judging. Jurors consider and score each entry on a scale of one to nine. From this round of voting, a percentage of top-ranking work will be shortlisted.

On the first day of on-site judging, Juries will have a chance to review the shortlist to ensure everyone is comfortable with it before it’s made public. Typically around twenty per cent of entries will make it to this stage.

Working from the shortlist, Juries look at the high ranking work and decide which ones are worthy of a Bronze, Silver or Gold. It takes a two-thirds majority vote to be awarded.

Finally, after voting has been locked in, Juries select their Grand Prix from the Gold winners. The Grand Prix represents the best in show and is the highest accolade awarded.

Entries for non-profit organisations and charities aren’t eligible for the Grand Prix in their Awards, but will be considered for the Grand Prix for Good.

We employ a number of measures to ensure the judging process is fair.

We have a bespoke judging system that looks for unusual patterns or anything that could indicate prejudice voting. We assess votes in real-time, and any anomalies will be flagged to the Jury President.

Jurors are not permitted to vote on work that is related to them, their company or their network. Should a piece of work a Jury member has worked on make it onto the shortlist, they will be asked to leave the room while the rest of the Jury vote.

To further ensure non-biased judging, we’ve worked with The Unmistakables, an award-winning equality, diversity and inclusion consultancy to co-create a series of compulsory bias awareness training modules. These are compulsory and aim to raise awareness, offer space to learn and reflect, and provide practical tips and actions for addressing bias throughout the judging process.