1. Excellence in Advertising
This category recognises the best advertising campaign or individual spot which engaged the target audience through strong creative thinking and media use to achieve a specific marketing outcome or result.
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 the increasingly creative methods used to reach B2B audiences. This category encompasses all advertising; branding, marketing, and communications work for B2B brands and can include a one-off or on-going campaign.
5. Excellence in Brand Awareness
This category recognises the best marketing campaign or initiative that successfully increased recollection for a firm’s products or services amongst target audiences. The initiatives can include both above the line and below the line activities.
6. Excellence in Brand Strategy
This category recognises the best brand strategy as reflected in a campaign or any marketing initiative. Entrants are reminded to expand on how the brand strategy took shape and the results it saw.
7. Excellence in Communications / Public Relations
This category recognises the organisation that has best enhanced its corporate branding, image or identity with the consumer public, other businesses, or internal stakeholders through effective implementation of strategic communication to deliver core business objectives.
8. Excellence in Consumer Insights / Market Research
This category recognises the organisation that used research or database development most effectively to gain insights that were pivotal to the success of a campaign, initiative, or communication.
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 Customer Data Privacy Assurance *NEW*
This category honours brand initiatives that ensure customer data is secure and handled responsibly, with minimal or no access granted to third parties. Entrants must demonstrate transparency and accountability, such as clearly outlining data protection measures in agreements or showcasing innovative approaches to safeguarding customer information. Examples include brands like Apple emphasising their commitment to privacy in products and communications.
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 Privacy and Security Marketing
This category celebrates campaigns that educate and empower consumers to protect themselves from scams, data breaches, and online fraud while also highlighting the importance of data privacy and cybersecurity. Entrants should demonstrate how their initiatives effectively raise awareness, provide practical tools or guidance, and reassure consumers about data protection in an increasingly digital world. Examples include campaigns by banks, tech companies, or public organisations that champion personal data security and fraud prevention.
14. 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.
15. Excellence in Digital Marketing
This category recognises the best marketing campaign, initiative or programme that used digital channels such as web, mobile, email etc. to deliver an engaging consumer experience whilst successfully driving core business objectives.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. Excellence in Experiential Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that best implemented an experiential programme that allowed consumers to get involved in, feel, enjoy, or share in the brand experience. This should have translated into a positive perception of the brand for consumers.
19. 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.
20. Excellence in Integrated Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that best engaged its target audience through an integrated marketing strategy. This strategy should have employed a suite of marketing tools and at least 3 media channels whilst successfully driving core business objectives.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. Excellence in Live-Streaming Marketing *NEW*
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.
24. Excellence in Location-Based Marketing
This category recognises campaigns that effectively utilise location-based services, geofencing, and proximity marketing to deliver personalised and location-specific content to consumers. Submissions should highlight how location data has been leveraged to boost engagement and conversions.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. Excellence in Media Strategy
This category recognises the organisation that best utilised media channels as their key strategic tool to execute a powerful marketing campaign while successfully driving core business objectives.
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. Excellence in Out-of-Home Advertising
This category recognises advertising campaigns that utilised the Out-of-Home (OOH) medium in an innovative, creative way that successfully raised brand awareness. OOH can include media such as billboards, transit media or any other media traditionally classified as OOH.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. Excellence in Retail / Shopper Marketing
This category recognises the organisation that most effectively ran a campaign, initiative or programme designed to reach shoppers via sampling, competitions, in-store or in a retail environment etc., and successfully translated this into future purchases of the featured product(s).
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. Excellence in Sponsorship Activation
This category honours campaigns that effectively leverage sponsorships to create meaningful and impactful brand experiences. Entrants should demonstrate how they activated sponsorships (including but not limited to events / broadcasts / online platforms, sports / esports, entertainment, influencer partnerships etc.) to engage their target audience, enhance brand visibility, and drive measurable outcomes. Successful entries will showcase creative activations that align with the brand’s values and resonate with consumers.
40. 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.
41. Excellence in Urban Guerrilla Marketing
This category acknowledges unconventional and creative marketing tactics executed in urban environments to captivate and surprise city-dwelling consumers. Entrants should detail how they have effectively utilised guerrilla marketing strategies in urban settings, creating memorable and buzz-worthy experiences that resonate with urban audiences.
42. 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.
43. 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
44. 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.
45. Marketer of the Year (Not for Entry)
This category recognises the brand that performs best at the Marketing Excellence Awards 2025.
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.
