MEPRA Explains Why They Introduced a People's Choice Award Category For This Year's Award Show
Communicate sat with Ray Eglington, MEPRA Executive Board Member and Group Managing Director at Four Communications, to discuss the reasons behind introducing the 'People’s Choice Best Campaign of the Last 20 Years’ category for this year's MEPRA Awards.
What drove you to include this type of award?
This year marks MEPRA’s 20th anniversary, that’s two decades of supporting communications professionals in the Middle East through training, knowledge sharing and promoting excellence. We wanted to celebrate this milestone through our MEPRA Awards by creating an award for the ‘best campaign of the last 20 years’, and who better to decide the winner than the audiences who consume the content? The MEPRA Awards ‘People’s Choice Best Campaign of the Last 20 Years’ is a great way to get the public involved, celebrate the industry’s best work over the last 20 years and mark MEPRA’s anniversary.
How will it be organized?
Organisations can enter the People’s Choice award as they would any other category in the 2021 MEPRA Awards. They will need to strictly follow the judging and scoring criteria, including outlining the objectives, research, strategy, execution and results plus why the campaign was a ‘game changer’. The entries will be reviewed and scored by our judging panel of more than 50 regional and international communication leaders and the top five campaigns will be published on mepra.org and put to a public vote once finalists are announced in late October. Voters will need to register to place a vote and votes will be limited to one per IP address, to limit multiple participation and allow for a fair result.
What kind of voter audiences will you be targeting and how?
The MEPRA Awards People’s Choice Best Campaign of the Last 20 Years will be one of the top accolades at this year’s MEPRA Awards. To be named the winner of the best campaign over the last 20 years will carry a lot of weight in the industry, so we want to make sure we encourage as much participation as possible in the selection of the winner. We will promote the finalists in this category through all our usual channels, including MEPRA’s newsletter, social and digital channels plus through industry media and business press to push for as much participation as possible. We of course want our industry to take part, but this is relevant for any consumer in the Middle East who can objectively judge whether a campaign has had a lasting impact. Also, marketers, content creators and advertisers in our region who understand the difference between a good and great campaign will be encouraged to participate.
The value of adding a people's award to a B2B event
As communicators and content creators we seek to make an impact through our campaigns to ‘the people’. While our judges can score on the merit of each campaign as industry experts, the people will vote based on how the campaign made them feel and what impact it had on them personally. It also creates a unique opportunity to get more people inside and outside the communications industry involved with MEPRA, the Awards and help celebrate the special 20th anniversary milestone.
