How To Win An Effie – Eugen Suman

EFFIE is the most significant award in our industry because it honors the one truly important achievement in advertising: Results. It is the award presented annually by the New York American Marketing Association in recognition of the year’s most effective advertising campaigns – campaigns that have delivered superior results in meeting or exceeding the objectives they were designed to achieve. EFFIE is a national award spread internationally and it has been organized since 1968.

But what are the keys to winning an EFFIE? Some of the specialists in the market answered for AdHugger.net. Today, Eugen Suman, Executive Creative Director Friends \ TBWA Bucharest.

First of all, let me just say that I’m very happy to be a part of the Effie Jury for the third time, it’s a wonderful experience. For someone who will be at her first participation, I would say that keeping an open mind, staying positive and concentrating on the good things of the case would be the most important things to keep in mind when judging. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of finding the negative parts and then be blinded to the good stuff. Also you should keep in mind that it’s crucial to recuse yourself if there are conflicts of interests. For instance, if your agency has a beer client, you should definitely not judge the beer category, even if your beer client is very small and you didn’t enter anything in the competition.

First and foremost you meet so many people from the client side that you wouldn’t normally, and that’s a great thing for smoothing the rough edges that sometimes appear between agencies and clients. When you‘re all into this battle together, it will be hard to be on different sides when it comes to day to day work. So that’s something good. It also teaches you that sometimes campaigns can be successful even without great creative, and that’s humbling. Of course, my suspicion is that they would have been even more successful had they employed better creativity, but that’s just something we’ll never know.

Don’t be aggressive, don’t be obnoxious, let other people talk, don’t think you have all the answers, don’t judge if you‘re not supposed to judge and are in a conflict of interests, don’t be late, try not to be too biased.

You don’t have to prepare. If you‘re invited to do jury duty then you‘re qualified to be there and do it.