The ANA is launching an awards program honoring in-house marketing teams to recognize and celebrate the impact their work has on their companies and brands.
The ANA In-House Excellence Awards will feature nine categories that will showcase the most creative, strategic, and growth-driving marketing and advertising campaigns created by an in-house agency team or department. Any marketing asset or project created to promote a company’s brand, product, or service that ran at any time in 2020 is eligible to enter the competition.
“The days when in-house teams are only tapped for quick and inexpensive work are long gone,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “Today’s in-house teams lead creative and media strategy, produce broadcast-quality commercials, and drive business results for their brands. It is time they are recognized for the great, substantive work they’re doing.”
The competition is open to anyone working as part of an internal team, whether within a client-side marketer, retailer, media company, nonprofit, or educational institution. Both ANA members and nonmembers can participate.
Categories
The In-House Excellence Award categories are:
- Branded Content: Original content created to support the marketing strategy of a brand that engaged, entertained, or informed a target audience. Any creative content not viewed as “advertising” is eligible.
- Experiential: Efforts that engaged with a target audience either live/in-person or via a virtual/on-demand experience.
- Integrated Campaign: Campaigns that utilized three or more distinct media channels to engage a target audience with a single unified theme or message.
- Internal Communications: Communication initiatives in any creative format that engaged and informed employees and provided understanding of a company’s vision, goals, values, work culture, and/or D&I initiatives.
- Social Media: Best use of social media to achieve a brand or company’s marketing objectives.
- Socially Responsible: All types of creative that directly address current social issues.
- Best Collaborative Effort: A showcase for the best and most successful collaborative efforts involving in-house teams and their external agencies.
- Best Media Thinking: Best formula for when, where, and how a target audience receives a creative message. This category will showcase in-house media teams that developed the best mix of media for reaching their target audience.
- Significant Results: Entries in this category will need to demonstrate with facts and figures the effectiveness of their work and its positive contribution to building a brand and expanding a business.
The event culminates with the Best in Show announcement, honoring the overall best entry chosen from the category winners.
Judging
A jury of leading marketers and agencies will review and score entries, with strategy, creative execution, and results being given equal weight.
The Significant Results category will give results 50 percent weight, with strategy and creative execution given 25 percent each.
One winner and up to two finalists will be recognized in each category. The program will accept entries from now through June 18. Winners will be announced at a virtual awards celebration on September 21, which will culminate with a “Best in Show” award winner honoring the single overall best entry.
Additional information and entry forms for the competition can be accessed here.
Federal judge orders Google to open its Android app store to competition
A federal judge on Monday ordered Google to tear down the digital walls shielding its Android app store from competition as a punishment for maintaining an illegal monopoly that helped expand the company's internet empire.
The injunction issued by U.S. District Judge James Donato will require Google to make several changes that the Mountain View, California, company had been resisting, including a provision that will require its Play Store for Android apps to distribute rival third-party app stores so consumers can download them to their phones if they so desire.
The judge's order will also make the millions of Android apps in the Play Store library accessible to rivals, allowing them to offer up a competitive selection.
Donato is giving Google until November to make the revisions dictated in his order. The company had insisted it would take 12 to 16 months to design the safeguards needed to reduce the chances of potentially malicious software making its way into rival Android app stores and infecting millions of Samsung phones and other mobile devices running on its free Android software.
The court-mandated overhaul is meant to prevent Google from walling off competition in the Android app market as part of an effort to protect a commission system that has been a boon for one of the world's most prosperous companies and helped elevate the market value of its corporate parent Alphabet Inc. to $2 trillion.
Google said in a blog post that it will ask the court to pause the pending changes, and will appeal the court's decision.
Donato also ruled that, for a period three years ending Nov. 1, 2027, Google won't be able to share revenue from its Play Store with anyone who distributes Android apps or is considering launching an... Read More