What is the Hermes Creative Awards?
The Hermes Creative Awards is an international competition for creative professionals involved in the concept, writing and design of marketing and communication programs and print, visual and audio materials. Entries come from corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies, PR firms, design shops and freelancers.
Who oversees the Hermes Creative Awards?
The Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP) (www.amcpros.com) administers the program. The international organization consists of several thousand marketing, communication, advertising, public relations, media production and free-lance professionals who have entered AMCP competitions. The Advisory Board oversees awards and recognition programs, provides judges and sets standards for excellence.
AMCP also administers the MarCom Awards, perhaps the largest and most prestigious international recognition program for marketing and communication professionals.
What is the mission of the Hermes Creative Awards?
The mission of the Hermes Creative Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the creativity, hard work and generosity of marketing and communication professionals. As part of its mission, AMCP fosters and supports the efforts of creative professionals who contribute their unique talents to public service and charitable organizations. Hermes entrants are not charged to enter work they produced pro bono. In addition, the efforts of generous marketing and communication professionals are being acknowledged through grants and special recognition. Last year, AMCP's Advisory Board awarded over $20,000 in grants for media materials for pro bono clients of AMCP members.
Why is there an AMCP fee on the entry form?
AMCP is doing whatever it can to keep entry fees at reasonable levels. Instead of charging several hundred dollars per entry, the entry fee is $60 per category or $100 per campaign or plan. Rather than increase the fee for each entry, an administration fee is being charged to help offset increasing overhead such as printing, mailing and data entry. By charging each entrant the same administration fee, entrants entering more than one category will be paying less than if the entry fee were increased.
Why enter the Hermes Creative Awards?
It’s all about recognition. Recognition for you and for your clients and bosses. Winners and their clients are listed on the Hermes Creative Awards’ website and in the next year’s Call for Entries. In addition, winners and clients can tout their awards through their news releases to their local media and on their own websites, newsletters and print materials. Winners also have the opportunity to showcase their achievement in their offices or homes and to present clients with attractive, high-quality, meaningful awards.
How is the judging done?
To ensure fairness and consistency, all of the judging is done in the AMCP judging room in Arlington, Texas. It takes two months of full-time work to judge all of the entries. Each entry is judged against itself and not directly against other entries. There could be no winners in a category or multiple winners. There are no lengthy essays to persuade the judges; so all work will be evaluated solely on its own quality, creativity and resourcefulness. Judges base their decisions on learned perceptions of creative excellence rather than an entrant’s imaginative explanation of an entry’s value.
Entries are judged at random. They are not grouped by categories and placed on tables for the judges to walk by and inspect. Each entry is read and discussed individually. The judges are experienced professionals who have had projects similar to anything that is submitted. The judges are cognizant of what an entrant has to work with and make their evaluations accordingly. A two-color brochure submitted by a non-profit is not compared to a four-color brochure submitted by an advertising agency for a Fortune 50 company.
Entries receiving scores between 90-100 points are Platinum winners. Entries with 80-89 points are Gold winners. Entries scoring from 70-79 receive an Honorable Mention certificate.
Why Does AMCP sponsor two similar competitions, the MarCom Awards and Hermes Creative Awards?
The MarCom competition is once a year. The need for recognition is year round. Rather than have multiple deadlines, AMCP decided to create a second competition and have it at a different time of year.
Why do we have to pay for awards?
Unlike many competitions, Hermes entrants do not subsidize awards for the winners. Instead of charging up to several hundred dollars per entry, competition organizers decided to keep entry fees at a fraction of that cost and let the winners buy their own awards if they so choose. The result is more affordable entry fees and a higher quality award that is not a trinket, but a piece of art that anyone would be proud to display and give to a client.
Who sees my entries? Do I need to enclose copyrights, credits, etc. with my entries?
Since many of the entries are internal or proprietary in nature, or are done for the government or another company, only the judges see entries. Immediately after judging, each entry is destroyed. No entrant information is sold, traded, displayed, made available to a third party or used for any other purpose. AMCP assumes that you have rights to materials and the authority to enter them, so you do not need to enclose that information with your entries.
Please explain Pro Bono as it pertains to the Hermes Creative Awards.
A pro bono entry is a project that you did for free for a non-profit that does not employ you. In other words, you did not get paid to do the work. An example of such work would be you personally or you in your role at whatever company you work for, designing a website for the local Homeless Shelter. Also, only entrants who enter a regular piece in the competition are eligible to enter pro bono work at no cost. This is a perk for those who help defray costs of overhead, mailings, judging etc.
You can only have one pro bono entry per client. Multiple pieces such as a brochure, website, video, etc. count as one entry. You can however have an unlimited number of pro bono clients. Please include a brief synopsis of what you did for each pro bono client.
If you want to submit pro bono work only, you must pay the regular AMCP and entry fees.