Warc 2017 Innovation Awards launched

“The need for brands to evolve and innovate has never been more critical,” says Jeremy Basset, head of Unilever Foundry and chair of last year's judging panel.

Judges selected

Several judges have already been appointed to this year's panel, including:

• Bill Cecil, director, Silicon Valley Office at State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, USA
  
• Frances Ralston-Good, CEO, Hearts & Science, UK
  
• Lizzie Shupak, head of innovation, DigitasLBi, UK
  
• Lucie Greene, worldwide director, The Innovation Group at J. Walter Thompson New York, USA
  
• Mike Medeiros, SVP, executive strategy director at McCann New York, US
  
• Roland Harwood, co-founder and md of 100%Open, UK
  
• Will Harvey, Innovation Lead for VCCP Partnership, UK
  
• Will Higham, behavioural futurist and founder of Next Big Thing, UK

More judges will be announced in coming months. They will decide which entries will be awarded Gold, Silver and Bronze awards. The Grand Prix for the best overall paper will receive $5,000. Warc will also present five $1,000 Special Awards that recognise specific areas of excellence: innovation in a product or service, channel innovation, category innovation, co-created innovation and innovation in a not-profit-campaign.

Now in its fifth year, the competition is free to enter and open to all forms of marketing and communications from any country. Entrants must submit a case study of marketing innovation that delivered tangible results for a brand. The work should have been in-market at any time between January 1 2015 and January 11 2017.

Full entry details and an entry form are available here. Entry deadline is 12 January 2017. All winning entries will be published and promoted in the Warc Innovation Casebook 2017, Warc's annual report on global communication ideas.