Let’s set the scene… Describe the Dominican Republic as a creative award judging destination.
The Dominican Republic is a lot like Mauritius. It is a four-hour flight from New York. There’s an amazing local culture in specific areas, and then a lot of spectacular resorts and entertainment.

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A pool at an airport. Who would have thought. Wish I put my speedo in my carry on. #oneshow #judging #dominicanrepublic

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Let’s take that a little further: Describe your personal judging process and how you stuck to the brief.
We first get down to a shortlist by ranking a piece of work out of ten. We judge for metal from there, where you vote for gold, silver, bronze, merit or no award. Once all the jurors’ scores have been combined into an average, we get to see the pieces of work that rose to the top.

Then we have discussions about the awarded work and every juror can give input.

But discussions are limited to positive affirmations, and on our jury there was no president, so the conversation and flow depends on the case a specific juror puts forward on a piece of work. If you do want to adjust your scores you can, but these adjusted scores are not revealed like they are in other award shows, which then often leads to another, more intense discussion if the scores don’t reflect the case a certain juror put forward.

This allows people to judge openly and honestly, based on how a piece of work really makes you feel as an individual.

Love that. Without giving too much away, talk us through the quantity and overall calibre of entries you judged and any stand-out trends.
I judged for the integrated, experiential and immersive categories. There was a lot of very powerful work on show. Some of the work was work that the jurors had already seen, in shows like Cannes and then there was some new, fresh work that none of us had seen.

The work that won showed originality, an understanding of the brand and its place in culture and often had some technology aspect to it. There were a lot of tech-based or data-driven ideas and executions that had no real story to them, or had a gimmick with a superficial brand link. This kind of work was booted out early. It was refreshing to see a broad range of work for real briefs, which addressed real consumer problems.

That work that made the cut didn’t necessarily feel as worthy or as purpose-driven as some other award shows. Some brands were just having fun and pushing their campaigns into provocative and compelling places.