The deadline for entries into the 2024 AMEC awards is fast approaching. Past winners of this prestigious global awards programme, which celebrates best practice in communications measurement include Shell, McDonalds, Unicef and Honda. Agencies from across the media intelligence community, PR and comms industry submit case studies to reveal how inspiring measurement and evaluation programmes have helped shape comms priorities, strategies and tactics.

Earlier in June 2024, AMEC hosted a webinar and published this blog post with tips on how to craft an award-winning entry.

Here are some other factors which may help your entry receive points from the judges, and don’t forget, the deadline for entry into the 2024 AMEC awards is on July 22^nd 2024:

• Do you have evidence or anecdotes demonstrating client buy-in or follow up? Agencies sometimes submit ‘anonymised entries’ when clients are unwilling to be named or quoted in an award submission. For reassurance, only the AMEC judges will see an award submission. However, we do understand the procedural hurdles that many have to pass through to receive client sign off, so be mindful that it is still possible to enter without directly naming the end client. Nevertheless, any quotes which you can include either from clients or from senior internal stakeholders if you are entering on behalf of an in-house comms team, will add external validation to your entry which could help score points.  Furthermore, if your supporting quote reveals how communications strategy or tactics changed behaviours, processes or future activations based on the media insight from the measurement programme, this can help win points in the ‘effectiveness of assignment’ segment found in of most of the categories (this section also carries the most points). In this section judges are asked to consider: ‘Did the client act on the report and obtain good commercial value from the evaluation?’ and ‘How this work will impact future communications planning?’
• Use the formatting option in the online portal to your advantage. AMEC’s award programme is hosted on an online portal. There are formatting options on this portal including bold, italics, hyperlinks, bullet points and numbering. Use this formatting to your advantage, bold keywords or phrases for emphasis, make it easier for the awards judge to pinpoint the key elements of your entry. Use bullets or numbering to save words.
• Don’t hide the good stuff in your supportive documentation. AMEC allows entrants to supplement their entries with supportive documentation. This can be 4 slides / pages max and/or a video with 20mb file size limitation. Don’t use this option as an overflow choice if you have gone over the word count – all your good stuff needs to be in the main body of the entry in the awards portal.
• Tailor your text even if entering the same award in multiple categories. It is possible to enter the same entry into multiple categories – for example you may wish to enter a sector specific award and enter it into the relevant regional category too. It makes sense to at least tailor the 100-word summary requested for most of the award categories so that the entry has a clear link to the category which it is entered for.