Award Categories

1. Excellence in Advertising

This category recognises the most outstanding advertising campaign or individual spot that has captivated its target audience through powerful storytelling, innovative creative execution, and strategic media placement. Entrants should demonstrate how their campaign delivered strong brand resonance, emotional connection, and measurable business impact. Whether through traditional, digital, or integrated channels, this category celebrates advertising that not only turns heads but drives real results.

2. Excellence in AI-Powered Storytelling
This category recognises marketing campaigns that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to create captivating and personalised brand narratives. Whether through chatbots, predictive content, or AI-driven recommendations, these campaigns demonstrate a mastery of technology to connect with consumers on a deeper, more individual level. Entrants should showcase how AI was instrumental in tailoring storytelling and message delivery.
3. Excellence in Anniversary Marketing
Whether it’s the 1st, 25th or even 100th year of a company’s existence, anniversaries are important milestones that provide the perfect opportunity to drum up excitement, awareness and engagement. This category recognises the campaigns that take full advantage of the business’ anniversary to make positive buzz and grow their market share.

Judges will be assessing the overall strategy and impact of the anniversary component on the overall success of the campaign. Where possible, demonstrate how the anniversary component led to a more successful and effective outcome towards campaign and business objectives.

4. Excellence in B2B Marketing
This category recognises exceptional creativity and innovation in reaching and engaging business audiences. It celebrates outstanding advertising, branding, marketing, and communications efforts designed specifically for B2B brands. Entries may include one-off or ongoing campaigns that demonstrate strategic thinking, impactful messaging, and measurable success in building relationships, driving leads, or strengthening brand authority within the business ecosystem.
5. Excellence in Brand Awareness
This category honours the most effective marketing campaign or initiative that significantly elevated awareness, recall, and recognition of a brand, product, or service among its target audience. Entries should showcase how strategic messaging, creative execution, and a well-balanced mix of above-the-line and below-the-line activities worked together to leave a lasting brand impression and deliver tangible results.
6. Excellence in Brand Strategy
This category celebrates the most compelling and well-executed brand strategy demonstrated through a campaign or marketing initiative. Entrants should outline how the strategy was conceived, developed, and brought to life across channels, highlighting how it strengthened brand positioning, resonated with audiences, and contributed to overall business growth and long-term equity.
7. Excellence in Communications / Public Relations
This category recognises organisations that have effectively enhanced their corporate reputation, image, or identity through strategic communication and public relations. Whether targeting consumers, business partners, or internal stakeholders, entries should demonstrate strong storytelling, message alignment, and strategic execution that drove positive perception, trust, and business results.
8. Excellence in Consumer Insights / Market Research
This category recognises organisations that have effectively leveraged research, data analytics, or database development to uncover pivotal consumer insights that directly shaped a campaign, initiative, or communication.

An example of a potential entry could be like that of how an instant noodle brand leveraged local market research to develop new flavours that resonated with regional preferences, leading to a successful product launch with 15% higher-than-expected sales.

9. Excellence in Content Marketing
This category recognises campaigns that effectively use content to engage, inform, and inspire their target audience. Entrants should demonstrate how their content strategy drives brand awareness, customer engagement, and business results. Examples include blogs, videos, social media posts, and other digital content that provide value to consumers while aligning with the brand’s overall objectives.
10. Excellence in CSR / Cause Marketing
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative, or programme by an organisation for a charity or cause the organisation had a partnership or association with. The organisation should be able to prove the initiative benefited both parties and had positive effects and outcomes for society or the cause.
11. Excellence in Cultural Storytelling *NEW*
This category celebrates campaigns that authentically reflect Indonesia’s rich cultural diversity — from local traditions, languages, and communities to contemporary expressions of identity. Entrants should demonstrate how they’ve used storytelling to bridge cultural nuances, foster inclusivity, and connect deeply with audiences on an emotional level. Judges will look for creativity, authenticity, and measurable impact in driving brand affinity or behaviour change through culturally rooted narratives.
12. Excellence in Customer Engagement
This category recognises a campaign, initiative or programme that successfully encouraged customers to emotionally connect with the brand. Judges will be looking for initiatives that went beyond advertisements to encourage consumers to actively participate in the brand’s programme.
13. Excellence in Data-Driven Marketing
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative or programme that adopted innovative and effective business intelligence, data planning, measurement, and analytic tools to improve targeting whilst successfully driving the organisation’s core business objectives.
14. Excellence in Digital Marketing
This category recognises the most outstanding marketing campaign, initiative, or programme that leveraged digital platforms — including web, mobile, social, email, and emerging technologies — to deliver an engaging and seamless consumer experience. Entrants should demonstrate how digital innovation, creative execution, and strategic use of data and technology effectively met core business objectives, strengthened brand engagement, and achieved measurable impact.
15. Excellence in eCommerce Marketing
This category recognises the brand / marketplace that had an outstanding performance in the online selling of products, services, or information to end users. Entrants should illustrate the best innovative eCommerce strategy that successfully communicated a brand’s image, changed consumers’ behaviours and drive consumer traffic to the ecommerce platform. Judges will be looking at how the strategy was developed and how the online platform(s) were used in offering a unique online shopping experience and which helped to achieve brands’ business targets.
16. Excellence in Event Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that best used events as a key tool to increase brand awareness and customer engagement. Entries can be for small-scale events or large-scale events targeting the general public. This category is open to physical, virtual or hybrid event executions.
17. Excellence in Experiential Marketing
This category recognises the most impactful experiential marketing campaign or initiative that brought a brand to life through immersive, interactive, and memorable experiences. Whether through live events, pop-ups, virtual activations, or hybrid engagements, entries should demonstrate how the brand successfully connected with consumers on an emotional level, encouraged participation or sharing, and strengthened overall brand perception and loyalty.
18. Excellence in Financial Empowerment Marketing *NEW*
This category recognises marketing initiatives that promote financial literacy, inclusion, and empowerment — helping Indonesians make informed financial decisions. Eligible entries include campaigns by banks, fintechs, insurers, investment platforms, or brands that educate, enable, or democratise access to financial tools and opportunities. Judges will assess creativity, accessibility, measurable behavioural change, and long-term impact on financial awareness and confidence.
19. Excellence in Gaming
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative or event that utilises gamification or gaming to entertain consumers and to enhance the brand experience while driving core business objectives. The campaign can be carried out both online or a live gaming event.
20. Excellence in Influencer / KOLs Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that effectively used influencers within a marketing campaign to enhance awareness and successfully achieve business objectives. Influencers could include appropriate experts, ambassadors, bloggers or celebrities etc.
21. Excellence in Integrated Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that most effectively engaged its target audience through a cohesive and results-driven integrated marketing strategy. Entrants should demonstrate how a suite of marketing tools and at least 3 media channels — such as digital, social, print, broadcast, or experiential — were strategically employed to deliver a unified brand message, create meaningful engagement, and successfully drive core business objectives.
22. Excellence in Interactive Marketing / AR & VR
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative or event that successfully engaged consumers using entertaining and engaging content in the form of a game, competition, or other interactive media forms such as virtual and augmented reality. Judges will be looking for how an interactive solution enhanced the brand experience and drove business objectives. We welcome entries from sophisticated gaming, VR, AR, and related apps created by highly creative developers, agencies, and client marketers.
23. Excellence in Launch Marketing
This category recognises an exceptional marketing strategy to support the launch or re-launch of a brand, product, or service. Entries in this category should be able to demonstrate the impact this launch strategy had on the brand, product, service, or organisation’s success.
24. Excellence in Live-Streaming Marketing
This category honours innovative campaigns that use live-streaming to engage audiences, build brand awareness, and achieve business goals. Entrants should showcase creativity, audience interaction, and effective use of live-streaming for events, launches, shopping, or other marketing initiatives.

Examples include product launches, live shopping events, educational streams, or interactive Q&A sessions that deliver real-time value and foster community engagement.

25. Excellence in Location-Based Marketing
This category recognises campaigns that effectively use location-based services, geofencing, or proximity marketing to deliver personalised, location-specific content. Submissions should showcase innovative strategies that leverage location data to drive engagement, footfall, and conversions, demonstrating creativity, effectiveness, and meaningful consumer impact.

For example, a fast-food chain utilised real-time location data to adjust its online advertising spend, ensuring its ads were directed to customers based on their proximity to stores. This strategy significantly enhanced ad relevance and increased foot traffic to physical locations, illustrating the power of location-based marketing in driving consumer engagement.

26. Excellence in Loyalty Marketing
This category recognises the best campaign, initiative or programme that demonstrated a cohesive customer loyalty strategy and effective CRM programme to grow and retain existing customers through incentives whilst enhancing the customer proposition. It should also have encouraged greater spend, resulting in positive business outcomes.
27. Excellence in Marketing Innovation
This category recognises an organisation that has pushed the boundaries and demonstrated outstanding marketing innovation in a campaign, initiative, or programme, be it through the use of unconventional marketing techniques like guerrilla marketing, new technologies like augmented reality, or adapting limited resources to achieve specific marketing objectives.
28. Excellence in Marketing to a Specific Audience
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative or programme aimed at a specific audience. This is not exclusive to a single audience but the majority of the target audience should be a specific demographic the campaign set out to approach. Specific audience bases could include gender, age group, interest groups (e.g. wellness, racing, esports etc.) and other profiled audiences. Entries should show why the specific audience was important and how the audience responded well.
29. Excellence in Marketing Transformation
This category recognises the organisation who best revamped a marketing team(s) to transform their marketing process and / or output. This could be a consultative project by an agency or a project conducted by in-house transformation team. Entrants should be able to demonstrate an effective transformation with minimal disruption and a positive impact on subsequent marketing campaign results.
30. Excellence in Media Strategy
This category recognises the organisation that most effectively leveraged media channels as a strategic driver to deliver a powerful and results-oriented marketing campaign. Entries should demonstrate how smart media planning, innovative channel selection, and data-driven optimisation maximised reach, engagement, and ROI, while successfully achieving the campaign’s core business objectives.
31. Excellence in Mobile Marketing
This category recognises the most effective and innovative use of mobile marketing. Campaigns could have included the use of apps and mobile as a media format, mobile app marketing and / or marketing and advertising through mobile and apps to achieve a specific marketing outcome, be it branding, a prompted consumer behaviour or simply increased consumption.
32. Excellence in O2O Marketing *NEW*
This category recognises brands that have successfully created seamless, integrated journeys between online and offline touchpoints — driving both digital engagement and real-world action. This award celebrates campaigns that have redefined consumer pathways by connecting e-commerce, mobile, social, and physical experiences into one cohesive strategy. Whether through data-driven insights, immersive technologies, or innovative retail collaborations, entries should demonstrate how O2O marketing translated into tangible results such as increased conversions, brand loyalty, or enhanced customer experience.
33. Excellence in Omnichannel
This category recognises the most effective approaches to omnichannel marketing, including how the entire customer experience was aligned across all touch points to drive a customer-centric experience.

Judges will be evaluating the effectiveness and results of the campaign. Entries should demonstrate how the use of omnichannel marketing increased conversion rates and helped meet campaign and business objectives.

34. Excellence in Out-of-Home Advertising
This category recognises impactful out-of-home (OOH) campaigns that creatively and effectively engage audiences in public spaces. Submissions should focus on the innovative use of outdoor spaces, such as billboards, transit ads, and digital screens, to amplify brand presence.

An example of a potential entry could be like that of how an electronics company used eye-catching digital billboards showcased dynamic content to promote the phone’s features, boosting pre-orders by 30%.

35. Excellence in Performance Marketing
This category recognises the best performing marketing campaign, initiative, or programme. Campaigns entered into this category should be aimed at driving actions and response as opposed to simply raising awareness. Entries should demonstrate evidence of campaigns having been optimised in real time and remuneration to the relevant vendors and platforms should have been based on results delivered.
36. Excellence in Personalisation Marketing
This category recognises the best marketing campaign in perfecting the consumer journey and creates more personalised marketing or one-to-one marketing to deliver individualised content to recipients across channels, and buying stages. Entrants should illustrate the strategies to deliver value and expected experiences to customers. Judges will be looking at how the strategy was developed and how the organisations leverage omni-channel advertising to drive personalised customer experiences in real-time.
37. Excellence in Programmatic Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that best used programmatic strategies and solutions to optimise a campaign and greater enhance the targeting to a specific audience. Entrants should be able to demonstrate how the programmatic strategy specifically improved the campaign’s success and helped achieve business objectives.
38. Excellence in Relationship Marketing
This category recognises campaigns / strategies / programmes that focus on building long-term engagement. Judges will be looking for entries that go above and beyond intrusive advertising and sales messages and focus on enhancing loyalty through open communication and personalised messaging / offers.
39. Excellence in Search Marketing
This category recognises the most effective digital marketing campaigns that had search marketing at their core. Entries should cover campaigns that were geared for cross-channel search engine optimisation, including both desktop and mobile SEO.
40. Excellence in Social Media Marketing
This category recognises the best campaign, initiative or programme that optimised social media channels to build strong relationships with customers, recruit new audiences or engage existing consumers whilst driving core business objectives. This can be a one-off campaign or a longer-term strategy.
41. Excellence in TV / Video Advertising
This category recognises the most creative, entertaining, and effective video advertisements. This category will cover both traditional television advertising as well as advertisements deployed on digital video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo etc.
42. Excellence in Urban Guerrilla Marketing
This category celebrates guerrilla marketing campaigns that creatively utilise urban spaces to surprise and engage audiences in unexpected ways. Submissions should highlight innovative, attention-grabbing tactics that disrupt everyday environments in an unconventional manner.

An example of a potential entry could be like that of how an energy drink company used a high-impact stunt involving skydivers landing in the city centre, creating buzz, and increasing social media mentions by 50%.

43. Excellence in Viral Marketing
This category recognises campaigns that successfully create highly shareable content, generating widespread awareness and engagement through organic word-of-mouth and social sharing. Entrants should demonstrate how their viral marketing efforts have captivated audiences, sparked conversations, and achieved significant brand visibility, often surpassing traditional marketing channels. Successful examples will highlight creativity, relevance, and the ability to quickly capture and hold the public’s attention.
44. Marketing Leader of the Year (Talent Category)

This category recognises outstanding leadership and excellence from a brand-side chief marketing officer / head of marketing unit or marketing leader who has made a significant impact to their brand’s overall advertising / marketing output.

Entrants can nominate themselves or others; they should show achievements against objectives and evidence of business impact in the following areas within the eligibility period:

  • Creativity, innovation and the ability to pivot quickly and effectively
  • Strategic, out-of-the-box thinking
  • Excellent execution that helped manage cash flow for optimum business health
  • New business or the creation of new business opportunities / new markets etc.
  • Stability of the organisation’s business performance
  • Unquestionable leadership, motivation and support for their teams
  • Any other exceptional action, achievement or work that especially merits this award
45. Marketing Team of the Year (Talent Category)

This category recognises outstanding work from a client-side marketing team which has made a significant impact to their brand / organisation’s overall marketing campaigns, executions, and results. Entrants can use one particular campaign as a case study of evidence to form their entry or can use aspects from various projects, but all work must have taken place within the eligibility period and they must show evidence of:

  • Outstanding achievements in campaigns and project management
  • Creativity and innovation
  • Strategic thinking
  • Excellent planning and execution
  • Successful results against objectives / KPIs
  • Any other exceptional achievements or work that especially merits this award
46. Marketer of the Year (Not for Entry)
This category recognises the brand that performs best at the Marketing Excellence Awards 2026.

Points System:

  • Gold: 4 points
  • Silver: 2 points
  • Bronze: 1 point

Tie-Breakers:

  • Most Gold: If total points are tied, the brand with the highest number of Gold awards wins.
  • Most Silver: If Gold awards are also tied, the brand with the highest number of Silver awards wins.
  • Highest Average Score: If a tie still persists, the brand with the highest average score percentage (as assigned by the judges across all their winning entries) will win.
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Core Submission Template