The PRO Awards is the most prestigious award program for promotion marketers; a venue that showcases the finest, most innovative promotion campaigns created and executed by top promotion professionals. Entering the awards program can be a time consuming task, yet the importance of fully and carefully completing the process cannot be understated to ensure the best outcome for your work. To that end, PROMO has developed these guidelines to assist you in the process. The entry deadline for the 2011 PRO Awards is April 27 (late deadline is May 11 with an extra fee).
BEFORE YOU BEGIN
A hastily written or incomplete entry appears that way and will be reflected in your score. Before you begin the process, remember, you worked extremely hard concepting, developing and executing the promotion you are about to submit for one of the most prestigious awards available to promotion marketers: Take your time, organize your thoughts, speak with the program leaders to flush out all the details, chat with the client, review all of the creative components and results. You can also read about the 2010 winners and finalists and the 2010 Best Overall Promotion.
Ask yourself a few questions: What elements of this promotion make it worthy of winning a PRO Award? Why did you choose this particular campaign? Was it the creative? The results? The theme? What’s different or unique about it? What made it successful? What will impress the judges (your peers).
Carefully read the 23 category descriptions and then decide which category (or categories) best fit the overall promotion. Enter in as many categories as possible, but make sure it’s a good match. An entry can be eliminated if the judges feel the category is not applicable to the promotion.
GETTING STARTED
DO NOT include the name of your agency in the write up, samples or video; You will be disqualified. Each entry reviewed and scored by the judges should be anonymous from an agency standpoint. The one exception is if you are a brand submitting an entry, then it is fine to mention the brand name.
FILLING OUT THE ENTRY FORM
These tips follow the outline of the entry form to help you fully complete each section.
Question 1. Overview
Make sure you answer completely all of the questions posed to “Describe the marketing situation.” Be concise and specific. Your entry will lose judges’ interest if they have to search for the important details or get bogged down trying to get through too many unnecessary words. Remember, the judges have many entries to review. A shorter explanation is sometimes better.
Question 2. Promotion Objectives
The word “specific” is key to your answer here. What were the goals? Spell them out. The judges should have a clear picture of what this promotion was to accomplish, and the results should reflect that.
Question 3. Promotion Description
Here’s where you really want to cut loose with all of the exceptional details. Take the judges from start to finish, add color, interesting facts and other tidbits. This should be a powerful story. By the end of this paragraph, the judges should be shouting, “WOW!”
Question 4. Campaign Performance Results
We can’t emphasize enough the importance of results. If you skip the results portion of the write up you automatically lose 25 points, which would probably knock you out of the running. The key here is to make sure the results match your stated goals above. For example, if the goal of the campaign is to increase sales volume by 4% and the results report that the promotion attracted 100,000 impressions, that will detract from your overall point score or possibly eliminate the promotion. If the goal is to build sales, supply a percentage increase in sales or comparative sales numbers. If the goal is coupon redemption, supply the amount of coupons distributed along with the redemption rates. Let the judges know how many samples were handed out, how many people visited your site, how many people attended the event, how many items were sold, etc. This is your only chance to give the judges enough information for them to gage the effectiveness of the promotion. Campaigns can sound and look terrific, but the results need to stack up. If you become a finalist or winner and have any issues with this information being printed our editorial staff will work with you on these details. It will be up to you, however, to contact us. If your campaign has not been in market long enough to have achieved results please refrain from submitting your campaign this year. It will be eligible in the 2012 program.
Promotion Samples (images/video):
As all of us know, creative helps tell the story. Upload images that support the details in the campaign write up. Upload between five and six images in the order in which you would like the judges to view them. (Specifications can be found in the entry form).
Video is great. If you have video as part of your promotion the judges we’ll love to see it. Keep the content under three minutes in length. You may submit video files in Windows Media Player format (.wmv) only. Video file sizes cannot exceed 10mb each. Video submissions should be no more than 300 pixels in width or height but they can also be much smaller, if you choose.
Good Luck and we look forward to receiving your entries.
Marci Werner is the PRO Awards Director. She can be reached at [email protected] or at 203-358-4397. Patricia Odell is executive editor of PROMO and senior editor at Chief Marketer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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