As marketers, we love to give each other high fives for great work. This is evident in the many global marketing awards that are given out by various third-party organizations out there. However, as the savvy marketers know, earning an industry award goes much further than the initial pat on the back.
For brands, marketing awards can be used to market your marketing internally with executives. They help to justify some of the work you’re team has been doing. For the agency, earning a prestigious award can elevate your ability to showcase your expertise to other brands who are interested in finding the top marketing agencies out there. For both brands and agencies, award winners make it easier to attract top talent.
All that said, the sad truth is that as the last thing we think about marketing is ourselves, which gives those that put the time into earning an award a leg up over their peers. Let us take a step back and review what many consider to be the top five marketing awards in the industry today.
- The Cannes Lions, which is the world’s biggest festival and awards for the creative and marketing communications, entertainment, design, and tech industries.
- The Global Effie Awards, which is a global symbol of achievement in any and all forms of marketing communication that contribute to a brand’s success.
- @EffieAwards
- https://www.effie.org
- The DMA International ECHO Awards, which recognizes truly original data-inspired storytelling.
- The Clios, which is the dominant creative award that recognizes the work, the agencies and the talent that push boundaries and establish a new precedent.
- Twitter: @ClioAwards
- https://clios.com/awards
- The D&AD Awards, which recognizes creative work with the highly coveted D&AD Pencil award.
Of course, there are hundreds of other awards you can shoot for. They range from global to regional and then start to segment pretty quickly into discipline. Popular disciplines are:
- Digital Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Website development and design
- Mobile Marketing
- Search Marketing
- Public Relations and Communications
- Direct Marketing
- Advertising
A few niche awards which I think are both clever and good to get recognition for are:
- The Shorty Awards, which recognizes excellence in editorial brevity on Twitter
- The MMA Smarties Awards, which is a global marketing award that honors innovation, creativity, and success.
- Content Marketing Awards, which recognizes work in 92 categories that range from content strategy to awarding praise for individual content pieces.
So get out there and submit your agency or in-house marketing program. We’re marketers… we should know how to market ourselves as well as we market our clients!