Everything you need to know about The Drum Awards Festival as it opens for entry
The annual celebration of global marketing effectiveness and creativity is returning with a revamped and simplified category structure, making it quicker and easier for entrants to find the right home for their award-worthy work.
The Drum Awards Festival switches to week long celebration of great work
The Drum Awards Festival 2024 is now open for entry. As always, agencies and brands will be able to enter creative categories for Advertising and Design, categories covering media channels such as OOH and media strategies across various business sectors. Also as in previous competitions, entrants will also find all the familiar categories for B2B, Content, Experiential, PR, Social and Social Purpose.
This year, however, Digital Advertising entries will sit under Advertising, while Live Experience is now simply called Experiential. Digital Experience is where entrants will find categories for outstanding work on the web and across the metaverse.
Another exciting development is that The Drum Awards Festival 2024 will take place over a single week, between November 11 and November 14, in front of a live audience in London. And, just like last year, all the results will be streamed live around the world.
We are also scheduling a webinar to allow entrants to hear from this year’s judges about what they look for in a winning report. (Register to take part in the webinar here.)
Judging panels for The Drum Awards Festival 2024 are formed from a diverse pool of influential brand marketers and recognized agency leaders from around the world. To ensure fairness, juries will be led by expert practitioners in their relevant marketing discipline and are currently being carefully selected to bring a global perspective to the judging process, with the appointment of a designated president to oversee all the deliberations.
Senior marketers from brands already signed up to judge include:
- Lisa Maxwell, VP, B2B marketing, Mastercard
- Tatiana Lindenberg, marketing vice president - Dirt is Good, Unilever
- Ryan De Joya, APAC media lead, Colgate-Palmolive
- Sunita Rajan, managing director, APAC media sales & marketing, Bloomberg
- Callum Watt, head of digital marketing, Britvic
- Sebastian Bourne, head of media northwest and central Europe, HP
- Billy Seabrook, senior partner, global chief design officer, IBM iX
- Anthony Key, VP media planning strategy & marketing analytics, BET Media Group, Paramount
Agency brands set to take part in judging entries this year include two of last year’s major award winners, VML and Canadian agency Rethink, alongside many top-ranked names from The World Creative Rankings.
- Karen Coleman, managing director , 303 MullenLowe, SydneyJames
- Irvine,global client partner & EMEA B2B lead, VML
- Toru Fujii, executive creative director, ADK
- Stacy Tarver Patterson, head of brand strategy, Code and Theory
- André Toledo, chief creative officer, DAVID
- Yasuharu Sasaki, global chief creative officer, Dentsu Group
- Katy Wright, chief executive officer, FCB London
- Grace Lerner Sharfstein, group creative director, global marketing, GroupM
- Patrice Pollack, senior vice president, executive creative director, Momentum Worldwide
- Mike Dubrick, partner and chief creative officer, Rethink Toronto
- Richard Denney, joint chief creative officer, St Luke's
- James Townsend, CEO, Stagwell EMEA + global CEO, Stagwell Brand X Performance Network
- Frances Draskau, group creative director, The&Partnership
- Maria Panayi,head of music marketing – EMEA, TikTok
(Sign up to The Drum Awards Festival newsletter for more jury announcements.)
As a global marketing awards competition, The Drum Awards Festival is for advertisers and their agencies, partners and suppliers regardless of geography, with last year’s festival seeing winners from as far afield as Toronto, Ukraine and Singapore.
Campaigns eligible for entry must have been live at some point between August 2023 and August 2024, although they do not have to have been created within that time frame.
Key Dates
-
Early Bird entry deadline: Wednesday, May 15
-
Official entry deadline: Wednesday, June 12
-
Extended entry deadline: Wednesday, July 10
-
Judging: between August 12 and September 20
-
Nominations announced: 3pm on Wednesday, September 25
Lynn Lester, managing director of The Drum Events, said of The Drum Awards Festival: “Moving to a one-week festival format is very exciting and will ensure that The Drum Awards Festival is the most dynamic global marketing awards scheme in the world. We have done a lot of work to revamp and simplify our categories and how the competitions are structured and we believe that will make it much easier for entrants to find the categories that are right for their work.
“My team is now busy signing up judges from brands around the world so that agencies can get their brilliant strategic and creative work in front of some of the biggest and most influential brand CMOs in the world, so watch this space to see who else we bring on board in the coming weeks.”