• Judges are hungry. They yearn to learn something that could help them in their own jobs. Don’t lobby them — inspire them. You are the teacher, not them. Judges at the IPA Effectiveness and Cannes Creative Effectiveness Awards will be more experienced and be under less time pressure. They will reward the technical merits of the case, in particular how well it deals with factors other than the campaign. Get client support Getting sales data from the client can take a long time. Don’t make the mistake of writing the paper while expecting to slot results in later. You absolutely need the sales data first, so you can fit the story to it, not the other way around. Often our day-to-day contacts don’t have sales data at hand. The very worst thing you can do is send an email with a long list of data needs and expect clients to drop everything. Being lazy never works. Instead, take the client out to lunch and explain how important the award would be for the company (and the client’s career). Ask if a central contact person in the client company could be assigned to the project for a few weeks to coordinate responses to your data requests. If you meet resistance to sharing data, elevate the request. Get your CEO to ask the client at a more senior level. Sometimes our day-to-day contacts can only say no. Clients have legitimate concerns about revealing confidential information. Explain that they will have the right of veto and that entering effectiveness awards is standard industry practice (and prove it by giving them previous entries in their category or from their own company). Define clear roles for each channel Involve your media partner early. You will need at least a full media laydown: which activity happened when, through which channels, at what weight. You will also need competitive spends over the period. Ideally, the media partner will have a strategy for why each channel was selected; or you may have done Fusion. Regardless, we must explain each channel’s role in the total campaign. Few entries cover this well, so being thorough gives us a chance to stand out. Avoid the obvious, e.g., “TV was used to create awareness.” Instead, say “TV was used to build a groundswell of popular support, print was used to arm our advocates with the facts they needed to take our brand’s side in the debate, activation was used to address value for money concerns,” etc. Show that everything was a facet of a central plan. 30