The case for putting your work on trial: BTS at Judges’ Day
Opinion
Ahead of this year’s World Media Awards Ceremony, World Media Group’s CEO shares what the judging discussions reveal about what makes a winning campaign.
Judges’ Day for the World Media Awards is one of my favourite days of the year. It’s always a privilege to witness a group of the industry’s most talented individuals debating the merits of each shortlisted campaign until they finally agree on a winner.
The results are typically kept under wraps until Awards Night. What rarely gets reported is the conversations that happen behind closed doors while the judges make their decisions.
It struck me that these discussions reveal far more about our industry than the final press release. So, while the winners remain firmly under wraps until 24 September, here are some of my observations from hearing our judges think out loud, disagree, revise their own arguments, and sometimes land on the same conclusion as a judge in a completely different category without realising it.
Ad metrics are out, outcomes are in
Across multiple categories, the same objection kept surfacing: reach and impressions are no longer enough of a differentiator – what matters is real-world impact.
Speaking about one of the winning campaigns, a judge told me:
Every shortlisted entry was able to show impressions, but the winner had a really well-designed approach to isolating the impact of the campaign on brand outcomes, business outcomes and on the audience they were trying to reach.”
In a world where impressions are cheap, and marketers are under greater scrutiny than ever, we are going to see more focus on outcomes than ever.
Memorability is what matters
If metrics have become the baseline, what are judges looking for in the winners?
Almost every conversation I heard about a winning entry came back to one single word: ‘remembered’.
Judges talked about the “emotionally connected storytelling” that stuck with them. “We all agreed the main hook was just so memorable for us,” one judge told me. Another said:
Simply, we all remembered those stories, which is the sign of a really brilliant campaign.”
It may sound obvious, but as a judge sifting through dozens of campaigns, memorability has an outsized impact.
The partnership is being judged as much as the output
It was clear that many of the judges weren’t just assessing the finished campaigns; they were examining how well the brand and media partner had worked together.
Judges first critiqued the content and whether it was a natural fit for the media owner, then looked at how fully the relationship had been explored. “We were impressed by the partnerships that leveraged multiple aspects and touchpoints of a publisher’s ecosystem,” one judge explained.
When it comes to writing an awards entry, showing how a relationship worked on paper is far more challenging than writing about the final asset, but that’s what gave many winning campaigns the edge.
Stories of how a brief had been revised or developed in collaboration with a media partner, and in some cases completely rewritten, captured the judges’ attention.
Constraint can be a creative advantage
Generally, budget size wasn’t a factor in identifying the work that most impressed the jury. In fact, in multiple categories, judges singled out campaigns that had turned limited resources and other constraints into a creative asset rather than treating it as a handicap.
One judge told me they gave a campaign “the ultimate stamp of approval” because “the content was created with so many constraints, yet they became opportunities and were leveraged well.”
At a time when marketing budgets are under pressure across the industry, this is perhaps one of the most useful takeaways – the biggest budget campaigns are not necessarily the winners.
The shared anxieties of the industry revealed
Not every theme was about the craft of marketing. In more than one category, the judges’ reasoning reflected the industry-wide excitement and unease around AI.
Multiple campaigns addressed how brands are grappling with AI’s impact, both the opportunities and the challenges it presents for brand marketers.
It was refreshing to see entries dealing with these collective, ongoing issues. One campaign, in particular, the judges described as “ahead of its time” for its “bold approach” to an issue that’s currently top of mind for brands and publishers.
Why awards matter as a benchmark
It’s easy to dismiss awards as vanity – a team night out or a trophy for the office shelf. Having watched the judges deliberate, I’d argue the opposite. Exposing your work to a judging panel is one of the few genuine benchmarking exercises in this industry.
Most campaign evaluation happens internally, against a brief and a budget set by the same team that built the work. Awards are judged by people with no stake in the outcome who are comparing your work directly with that of your peers – that’s rare and valuable.
It also forces a discipline that internal reporting rarely demands, examining a campaign’s impact clearly enough for a stranger to understand in a few hundred words, with no assumed context. That exercise alone tends to expose whether a result was genuinely well evidenced or just felt good internally.
Marking against new criteria
The Judges’ Day revealed a new set of criteria the industry is using to judge the very best in international content marketing: memorability over reach; partnership over polish; constraint over budget; and business outcomes over impressions.
Entrants spend months building campaigns to hit a brief. As always, writing an award entry that reflects that effort is no easy feat.
Summarising campaigns in a way that will make a judge remember their work after reading dozens of entries, or trust the partnership behind it, is hard. But, based on what we’ve seen, those that took the time to tell the story well definitely resonated with the judges.
We’ll find out who did it best when the winners are announced on Thursday 24.
If you’d like to join us to celebrate the brightest and the best in the industry, you can reserve your place here.
Jamie Credland is the CEO of World Media Group