About the awards

Great planning - that delivers brand and business benefits - lies at the heart of the most successful advertising campaigns. These awards are about finding and recognising those TV campaigns, whether used within a multi-media advertising campaign or on its own.   

Record viewing to linear commercial TV is delivering prices from the mid-‘80s in real terms, contributing to TV’s increasing effectiveness.   TV continues to deliver for advertisers and has been proved to be the most significant driver of revenues across a wide range of products. So why on earth wouldn’t you want to get the most out of TV in order to deliver fantastic business results to your clients?  There’s nothing more satisfying than delivering exceptional payback on your clients’ advertising investment.

And not only broadcast TV; we want to see how you are incorporating all of the TV-centric innovations into your plans: technology focussed ones like TV on-demand, web and mobile TV, TV companion apps, and others driven by regulation change such as  contextual advertising and product placement. Whether for long-term branding or short-term response, if you’ve got a good TV story to tell we’d like to hear it.

Entrants for these awards tend to come from media agencies.  But we also welcome entries from creative, integrated, direct, interactive or PR agencies or from brand-owners themselves.  TV broadcasters and their sales houses cannot themselves enter the awards, though they are welcome to help any entry-writer.

Before you begin…

… here are some basic rules plus some top tips.

Maximum word count is 3000 – but only use them all if you absolutely need them.  Succinct versions do better.  You can use pictures and relevant graphs in addition but don’t go mad.

Make it a good read and a proper story.  Each section should naturally emerge from the previous one.  Results should relate to the original objectives.

Give us a nice package.  Make it a pleasure to behold.  Nothing professional is required but give the entry a cool hard look and ask yourself whether you’d want to read it.  Is the font big enough? Is there enough white space?  Too few or too many images?  Any hideous spelling/punctuation errors?

Read the category definition properly and also look at how the judging and marking criteria work.  If this is an entry you have written for other awards you might need to rewrite it a bit and customise it to the category.

Do remember that these are The TV Planning Awards.  We won’t be impressed if you tell us in detail how many Facebook fans or YouTube views you’ve had but leave out the TV detail.

Did you spend less than £500k (net) on TV? Tell us if so and this will enable the entry to be considered for the ‘Best use of low budget’ award.

Collaboration usually delivers the best entries, whether between a planner and buyer within a media agency or across a brand’s agency roster.  A good entry ties together the strategic thinking with the implementational detail. 

Be generous.  Give credit to other people’s - and other agencies’ – contributions where deserved.

Award categories

There are a total of six categories you can enter, plus two extra awards in the judges’ gift. TV activity must have been broadcast within the calendar year January to December 2012*, although it can also run either side of that period and indeed this is requirement for the ‘Best ongoing use’ category.

1. Best Use of TV in an integrated campaign 
   This entry features the use of broadcast TV alongside at least one other medium (e.g. radio) or marketing discipline (eg PR, point-of-sale).  The other medium could be TV on-demand.  The entry should explain the role of each chosen element and how they worked with each other.
2. Best ongoing use of TV 
   TV keeps delivering value years after campaigns have aired so consistent TV advertising can produce exponential returns. Entrants need to tell us how they have used TV over three or more years for their advertiser, and how the activity has evolved to produce the best results. Entries must feature broadcast TV in every calendar year over the period featured (including the most recent calendar year, Jan – Dec 2012* )
3. Best newcomer to TV 
   This entry is for new brands or brands which have not used broadcast TV since January 2007 until doing so in 2012.
4. Best use of sponsorship or content 
   Sponsorship, branded content, advertorials, AFP, product placement, promotions, prizes, televised branded events, PR - there is now a wealth of rewarding ways to integrate your brand into the fabric of TV programming. Entrants must tell us why they chose this solution and how it worked for them.
5. Best use of TV innovation 
   From new TV technology to live ads & events, and from contextual advertising to 2-screening and augmented reality, innovative thinking in media planning and the clever use of technology is liberating TV and adding new dimensions every year. Entrants must explain how they used TV in a new way to good effect.
6. Best use of TV for response 
   TV builds brands but TV can also be used to very powerful effect for short-term and tactical objectives. All TV ads will generate instant response of some kind but this category is designed for those campaigns where short-term response is the over-riding objective.  Entries should explain how this response is optimized and maximized.

The Judges will also consider two additional prizes that cannot be entered for directly:

Best low budget use of TV

Any entry which spent less than £500k in total should indicate so on the entry.  This prize can be awarded to either a category winner or a worthy short-listed entry.

The Grand Prix

The Grand Prix is chosen solely from the winners of the six main entry categories.

(* - please contact Jamie Maskall if any clarification is required)

Awards

Each winning entry will receive a coveted Thinkbox TV Planning Award to grace your mantelpiece and your work will appear in a special awards supplement, distributed with both Campaign on Mediaweek.co.uk

All six category winners will then be eligible for the Grand Prix, the prize for which is a 52" HD internet enabled TV, for their agency.

Key dates

• Friday, 15 March 2013: closing date for submissions
• Tuesday, 7 May 2013: Judging day 
• Thursday 27 June 2013 Thinkbox TV Planning Awards Event

What to do next?

Well, the first thing to do is to pre-register your interest in entering the awards; it’s quick and easy to do. This will enable us to keep you updated with further announcements as we head towards the winning line and remind you of easy-to-forget things like submission deadlines.

Secondly you should have a good look at the critical elements your submission will need to include and the entry deliverables. You can read all this essential stuff here.

Also, we’ve also put together some handy hints on writing a successful paper.  

The ever-necessary small print is available for scrutiny here.

Finally, you may wish to have a look at last years’ winners, or find out what struck the judges from amongst the 2012 and previous papers and perhaps have a look at some pictures from the award’s ceremony to spot who partook of a sweet sherry or two.

Further queries

If you have any further questions, please give Jamie Maskall a call on 020 7630 2329 or drop him an email at jamie.maskall@thinkbox.tv.