PS. Great article too. Love your work.

I’m sure your rigourous process is doing a good job of identifying the work the industry considers to be the best. I guess my challenge is to extend beyond this internal focus. Marketers have a tendency to admire the “cool” rather than the “effective”. Let’s reward the work that client’s think is best, rather than the “industry”. How? By laying the data on the table. By proving the success of the campaign with real metrics that are publicly accessible.

That’s my challenge. I understand it isn’t easy to achieve this. Organisations are hesitant to release real data. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the positive PR.

@Jonathon – Don’t get me wrong. Creative is hugely important to the success of a marketing campaign/message. However, I do think there’s an overemphasis on creative in AIMIA’s awards criteria, which is reflected in their nominees.

Thanks very much for taking the time to review and comment on this years AIMIA Award Finalists.

Your post has prompted quite a bit of discussion which is great and I thought it worthwhile responding and (hopefully) addressing some of your concerns.

This is the fifth year I’ve overseen the judging process as an independent observer and co-ordinator so I thought it worthwhile sharing with you some of that experience and behind-the-scenes explanation of the process.

You’ve made some good points and while the AIMIA Awards are the oldest and most prestigious awards in the digital space we’re always looking to improve and welcome comments and suggestions.

I agree with your suggestion the Awards are about really about recognising excellence in the broad and growing sphere Digital Media and Services not only about Advertising. Over the past five years, Digital has had huge growth traction and visibility in the Australian Advertising Agency community – and it now represents a multibillion advertising media but equally many other sectors such as Education, Financial Services, Retail and Publishing and Entertainment who also continue to grow and innovate in their use of Digital. And these sectors as well as others are also all equally well represented in the AIMIA Awards.

The AIMIA awards are about creativity you’re right but equally they’re about effectiveness. The AIMIA Awards are determined by the views of over 100 Independent Industry Experts carefully assessing each work on seven separate criteria not simply creativity. These are Fitness for purpose, Design innovation, Visual impact and Aesthetics, Technical expertise, Conformance to W3C Standards, Usability and Accessibility and Special characteristics. And effectiveness is part of all of these.

Judging the AIMIA awards is an absolutely huge job – believe me! – involving many thousands of hours of work. It’s also one we take very seriously – each of the judges thousands of individual scores (this year over 20,000 data points) are recorded then aggregated and “normalised” in a similar process used by the Olympics to judge Diving and Gymnastics events designed and verified with help from Professor George Cooney, who oversees the Higher School Certificate scaling in New South Wales. And I’m absolutely confident it produces a true assessment of what the industry consider to be the best work of the year produced in Australia. Also, this year, for the first time, we’re also introducing a peoples choice award.

The first output of the AIMIA Awards process is the release of the finalists list which is not all nominated works but a small subset of all entries submitted for consideration that the judges via the above process have deemed exceptional:
• 16th AIMIA Awards Finalists http://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=1.36.6636.6640

Then from this list the winners in each category are determined again using the same rigorous process. The winners, of course, will be announced at the Gala AIMIA Awards night themselves this year in Melbourne on Friday 5th March.
I’d welcome any further comments or suggestions either via this blog or directly.

best regards,
Paul McCarthy
Chair of Judging
16th Annual AIMIA Awards
http://www.aimia.com.au/awards/