Warc launches 2017 Innovation Awards

The awards will be given to companies that have used disruptive and innovative marketing strategies

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | October 21, 2016

Warc launched its 2017 Innovation Awards, a global search for effective innovation in marketing with a $10,000 cash prize fund for the winning papers.

The Warc Innovation Awards seek innovative strategies that use new technology or familiar technology in a new way. A winning entry might show how a brand's products or services were transformed, or show how innovative thinking disrupted category conventions.

Jeremy Basset

Jeremy Basset, Head, Unilever Foundry and chair of last year's judging panel, said, "The need for brands to evolve and innovate has never been more critical.”

Now in its fifth year, the competition is free to enter and open to all forms of marketing and communications from any country. Entrants must submit a case study of marketing innovation that delivered tangible results for a brand.

The work should have been in-market at any time between January 1, 2015 and January 11, 2017. Full entry details and an entry form are available on www.warc.com/InnovationAwards

Entry deadline is January 12, 2017.

Several judges have already been appointed to this year's panel, including Bill Cecil, Director, Silicon Valley Office at State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, USA; Frances Ralston-Good, CEO, Hearts & Science, United Kingdom; Lizzie Shupak, Head of Innovation, DigitasLBi, United Kingdom; Lucie Greene, Worldwide Director, The Innovation Group at J. Walter Thompson New York, USA; Mike Medeiros, SVP, Executive Strategy Director at McCann New York, USA; Roland Harwood, Co-founder and Managing Director of 100%Open, United Kingdom; Will Harvey, Innovation Lead for VCCP Partnership, United Kingdom; Will Higham, behavioural futurist and founder of Next Big Thing, United Kingdom.

More judges will be announced in coming months. They will decide which entries will be awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Grand Prix for the best overall paper will receive $5,000. Warc will present five $1,000 Special Awards that recognise specific areas of excellence: innovation in a product or service, channel innovation, category innovation, co-created innovation and innovation in a not-profit-campaign.

Lucy Aitken, Case Study Editor at Warc, said, "The Innovation Awards is an exciting global competition that recognises the role played by innovative thinking in achieving best business results.”

All winning entries will be published and promoted in the Warc Innovation Casebook 2017, Warc's annual report on the world's freshest communication ideas.

The 2016 Innovation Awards Grand Prix was won by Bediz Eker and Arif Emre Perçin of Y&R Team Red Istanbul for 'Between Us', a campaign for Vodafone Turkey, which addressed the issue of domestic violence, and which the judges described as clever, powerful and true innovation.

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