PRIME Chair of Judges' top tips for success

Tuesday, 14 May, 2024

Our Chair of Judges, David Cousins, shares his top tips for a successful PRIME entry.

 

 

I’ve been entering and judging awards for longer than I’d like to admit, but those years of experience have helped me identify some consistent themes that go into crafting a great entry. It’s by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s my top five tips for success:

    1. Tell the whole story

      Don’t undersell just how amazing your work is by not telling the whole story. Take time to craft your entry from objective to outcome, and what happened in between.

    2. Focus on the idea

      Whether it’s education or advertising, every effective campaign has a central concept. When constructing your entry, make sure you cut through the waffle and let your idea be the hero.

    3. Demonstrate effectiveness

      Clicks, views, and completions are interesting campaign metrics, but the entries that rise above are the ones that attempt to explain return on investment. From social to academic to financial ROI, there’s always a way to calculate effectiveness.

    4. Be resourceful

      In today’s environment data is critical, and most companies keep theirs under lock and key. For the judges, it’s ok to use publicly available data as a proxy, just be clear about what you do and don’t know and explain why the approach you’ve taken is the best one.

    5. Tailor to the award criteria

      We encourage companies to celebrate their hard work by entering a campaign into multiple awards categories, but you MUST tailor the entry to the specific award criteria. For example, a judge’s expectations for an entry into Launch of the Year will be extremely different for the same entry into the Innovation Award. The first will be broad and detailed, spanning all the activities that went into making that launch a success, the second will be tight and focussed on a specific innovation within that launch.

We’re expecting PRIME’s 20th year to be the most competitive ever, so give yourself every chance of taking the stage on November 7 and get writing! Start your entries by heading over to the e-Awards portal today.