The Effies come to Pakistan
On Saturday, December 15, 2018, the Pakistan Advertisers Society (PAS) announced their partnership with Effie Worldwide, one of the most prestigious marketing award programmes in the world, at the Marriott, Karachi. As a result of this partnership, the PAS Awards will now be called the Effie Awards Pakistan.
Mamun M. Adil: How did the affiliation between the PAS and Effie Worldwide come about?
Qamar Abbas: Given the fact that it has been eight years since we initiated the PAS Awards (in 2011), an affiliation with Effie Worldwide was a natural progression in order to take our awards programme to the next level and thus become part of one of the most prestigious global networks. We initiated the discussion with them earlier this year and as the PAS Awards were structured on the Effie model, it did not take too much time for the affiliation to take place. In fact, after reviewing our award programme, they were quite keen to include Pakistan as one of their national programmes.
MMA: As a result of this affiliation, the PAS Awards will now become the Effies; how will the judging criteria change?
QA: When we started in 2011, Effie helped us in structuring our programme and we followed their model at every step. So essentially, the judging criteria will remain the same. For instance, all submissions will be evaluated on four criteria: Challenge and Objectives (23.33%), the Big Idea (23.33%), How the Idea was Executed (23.33%) and the Results (30%); each with their specific weightage. However, the process will become more robust in terms of the evaluation of the entries as well as our requirements when it comes to processing them. Furthermore, there will be a higher minimum qualifying score in place when it comes to short-listing entries or choosing a finalist. This means that there is a probability that there will be no winners in a certain category (if they do not receive the minimum number of points), or in some cases there may be a silver and bronze winner but no gold.
MMA: Will you be dropping any categories?
QA: As Effie acknowledges marketing effectiveness, we will be dropping all the categories that were judged on the basis of only creativity, as well as those that were medium-centric, such as Best in Digital or OOH etc. However, there are other specialty categories that have been introduced that will recognise innovation and creativity in specific mediums and their results will play an integral role when it comes to choosing the winners.