All vehicles & automotive aftermarket products including cars, trucks, motorcycles, vans, both brand and model advertising, gasoline, motor oil, tires, batteries, paint, quick-lube, oil change, muffler, transmission, windshield wipers, enhancements, etc.
All products and services related to:
Fast-moving consumer goods including household goods, office products, beauty and personal care, fashion & accessories, pet care, etc.
Examples:
All food and beverage products, including fresh, packaged and frozen food; snacks; desserts; alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
Health and wellness products and services that can be directly purchased by a consumer with or without physician involvement. Efforts may also be targeted to physicians or healthcare professionals. Also including work related to health insurance, dental and medical care services. Additionally, work that focuses on health education and disease awareness programs for healthcare professionals, patients and/or consumers.
All products and services related to:
New Product/Service Introduction: Efforts used to introduce a new product or service. Whether it is the creation of a whole new brand, a new product from an existing brand, or a new line extension, submissions in this category need to present how audience insights were leveraged to overcome the barriers faced by products/services being launched for the first time. Address the category situation and how your product/service was new and the situation you faced as a result of it being new. For example, what specifically was new? Why did the newness matter?
Open to all retail companies (online and/or brick & mortar) with general or specific merchandise. E.g. department stores; online retailers; clothing, fashion, shoes or jewelry stores; food retailers; movie/book stores; furnishings and design retailers, discount/bulk retailers; home & garden stores, pet care; toy stores; specialty stores; convenience stores, etc.
Financial products and services include: communications promoting the overall image and capabilities of a financial institution; insurance; specific products or services, including credit cards, charge cards, debit cards, home banking, loans, mobile payment services, mortgage, mutual funds, etc.
Includes services such as consulting, accounting, legal, employment, real estate, shipping/ delivery, domestic services, etc.
All modes of transportation such as air, train, bus, taxi, subway systems, rideshares services, bike shares, car rentals, ferries, as well as all forms of travel/tourism including cruises, hotels, resorts, amusement parks, travel websites and booking services, travel tours, tourism campaigns, etc.
The Health Effectiveness category celebrates marketing efforts proven effective in making a positive impact on health outcomes at an individual and societal level.
Winners of this award will be recognized for innovative marketing strategies, technologies or creative approaches that bring about change to improve patients’ lives.
Audiences can include, but are not limited to, patients, professionals, caregivers, advocacy groups.
Examples include improving patient understanding, engagement and treatment adherence or perhaps a change in healthcare professional behaviour or clinical practice.
Demonstration of significant collaboration with key healthcare stakeholders is important, as is the potential for long-term impact and scalability across regions or populations.
Entries must demonstrate clear results associated with improvements in health outcomes and be underpinned by data that provides a robust-evidence base.
*A separate entry form is required for the Health Effectiveness category.
For the AI Category, entrants are required to showcase their effective use of artificial intelligence to drive meaningful business outcomes. This category recognizes outstanding campaigns and initiatives where AI was leveraged as a pivotal tool to achieve specific business goals, whether it be enhancing customer engagement, optimizing operations, increasing sales, or any other measurable objective.
Entrants must provide clear evidence of how AI was integrated into their strategy and demonstrate the tangible impact it had on their business growth and desired results. This includes detailed metrics, analytics, and any other relevant data that highlight the effectiveness of the AI implementation. The judges will be looking for entries that not only display creativity and technical proficiency but also a profound understanding of how AI can be harnessed to produce real, quantifiable success.
This category is to showcase how you can create a brand experience beyond traditional advertising.
Work that truly brought a brand or product to life and interacted with a specific audience to achieve desired objectives should be entered. You may have re-invented the product demo, re-imagined the pop-up store, or led a “brick and mortar” retail overhaul; you could have created a new game, an alternate or virtual reality experience or interactive/immersive film experience that effectively showcases a new product or brand personality – it could have been anything. As long as you can prove it truly came alive and worked.
The winners of this award will show how advertisers are reaching out to their audiences to establish meaningful relationships, memorable, engaging experiences, and unique connections with their brands.
Entrants must address how the brand experience related back to the overall brand strategy.
This category is for marketing efforts from businesses targeting other businesses. Business-to-business efforts for any type of product or service, from any marketplace segment, are eligible to enter.
In this category, innovative single marketing & business activities or entire marketing programmes will be awarded. You can submit any actions or business idea that has had an exceptionally positive impact on the market position of a brand, product or service. If communication was a significant element of marketing mix, work should be submitted in another competition category of Effie.
Examples of eligible activities in this category include: product/service innovation; change in packaging, both in terms of its appearance and size; design, technology or ux innovation; consumer involvement in product development; operation change; introduction/change of a loyalty program, introduction of a new distribution channel, etc.
This category recognises those efforts that were lead by media thinking. The award honours media led strategic thinking and ideas that are powerful enough to become the genesis of the communications programme itself. The line between what constitutes a creative idea and a media idea is blurring. There are occasions when the media idea or media strategy drove the entire effort. All efforts driven by the media strategy and/or idea are eligible to enter.
Examples:
• Media Strategy – Cases where media planning and strategic approach spearheaded the effort.
• Content Led – Cases led by a content idea.
• Data Driven Insights – Cases led by a data driven insight.
• Tech Led – Cases led by a technology idea.
• Media Idea Led – Cases led by a Media Idea other than those listed above.
Cases eligible for this category must represent the only communications efforts for this brand during the qualifying time period. To be eligible, an entry may not be for a line extension, a sub brand, or have an overarching brand campaign to support it. Value of donated and non-traditional media as well as activation costs must be included. This category is all about what you were able to achieve with a small media budget, rather than small production and creative budget. Budget eligibility is as follows: €1 million.
This category is for efforts that set out with the explicit purpose of using social as the primary touch point or have social at their heart. The kind of idea that is specifically designed to take advantage of the socially connected consumer and the influence of social. This could include efforts that effectively worked with key influencers to reach their target audience to achieve short or long-term marketing goals.
Judges are looking for campaigns that begin with a social idea, as opposed to advertising or integrated campaigns with a social media element. They will need a clear rationale for why social was the right way to tackle the brief, and evidence of how social activity measurably and materially drove the commercial result. It is not enough to count the number of impressions, likes or shares. You will need to measure and prove the commercial value of social through the direct effect it had on audience behaviour or perceptions and demonstrate correlation with the achieved business results.
Product or service marketing efforts that have experienced sustained success for 3 or more years are eligible for entry.
Entries must have a common objective in both strategy and creative executions; with a continuation of core executional elements (e.g. spokesperson, song, theme, tagline, etc.) that demonstrates effectiveness over time.
*A separate entry form and different creative requirements are required for the Sustained Success category.
You may enter a case into a maximum of four categories. This can be one Industry category and three specialty category, or four specialty categories. You will need to submit a separate entry and pay separate entry fees for each category submission.
Note: Entrants decide whether to enter their case into an Industry category or the Specialty categories or to enter the case into both Industry and Specialty categories. However, it is important when entering your case to ensure the entry is customised to speak to the specifics of each category it is entered in. Judges expect entries to be tailored for the category they are reviewing.
The Effie Awards Europe reserves the right to re-categorize entries, split/redefine categories and/or refuse entry any at any time.
Unsure in which category to enter in?
If you are unsure in which category to enter, please email Kasia Gluszak (kasia.gluszak@eaca.eu) with a brief description of the campaign you wish to enter followed by your questions.
