Communications is about creating powerful ideas based on deep insights to connect brands’ messaging with audiences in meaningful ways and channels at meaningful moments. During this first year of the Extraordinary Awards, the Communications category will recognise any type of campaign designed and launched to meet a client’s business outcomes. This includes paid advertising campaigns, branding work, and/or public relations. The judges are looking for breakthrough campaigns – either single or sustained – for a client that helped deliver incredible results, either from brilliant creative, inspirational use of media (paid / earned), or a combination of the two.

We build seamless and distinctive experiences to make brands part of people’s lives – creating more memorable engagement and driving better business results. During this first year of the Extraordinary Awards, the Experience category will recognise work done for a brand / client outside a communications campaign to deliver better outcomes for the business. The judges want to understand how a brand or customer experience was improved by the work you and your teams did. This can include a large variety of customer touchpoints, from packaging to loyalty programs to customer-facing platforms (e.g. website, application, voice). What is important is how the new and improved touchpoint and moment resolves pain points or surprises and delights the end customer. 
Experience touchpoints focused on the point of sale (e.g. sales-focused website, retail store) should be entered into the Commerce category.

We want to make it easy for our clients to sell within the complex ecosystem of where and how their customers want to buy. During this first year of the Extraordinary Awards, the Commerce category will recognise work that better drives the consumers to sale for the client. This can include moments in offline commerce, like a retail store redesign, new merchandising, or new technology or operating model for sales staff. This can also include online platform build or optimisation, either D2C or through a third-party retailer, marketplace, or social commerce. The judges want to understand how your work improved the commerce experience for your client and the business outcomes that resulted from the work.

We build and optimise technology and data solutions fit for our clients’ needs. During this first year of the Extraordinary Awards, the Technology category will recognise work that harnesses technology and data to power creativity and improve efficiency. This can include enterprise systems work (e.g. architecture design, systems implementation), managed service across operations / platform management, or unique data analytics / performance reporting. This can also include specific platforms like CRM, content & experience management, or data management. The judges want to understand the impact of the technology build or optimisation and how it helped achieve your client’s business outcomes.

WPP is a company that delivers creative transformations for our clients. We are unique – when we are at our best, we discover brilliant insights and morph them into a breakthrough idea, which is the seed from which we help our clients face into the future. Our DNA is ideas and innovation surrounding a deep understanding of the customer. But our power comes from our deep partnership with clients and our convening power as the world’s largest marketing company. We have the scale to help our clients reinvent and renew themselves – which is more important than ever with the rate of change in all industries.
During this first year of the Extraordinary Awards, the Creative Transformation category will recognise our very best work across WPP that reflects what we do when we do our best work. It will recognise how we have used the power of creativity and the power of ideas to help clients truly transform their businesses – their business model, their customer experience, and/or their operating model. The judges will expect a strong contender for the Creative Transformation award to contain work that addresses multiple categories (Communications, Experience, Commerce, Technology) or truly transformational work in one of those categories that elevates business outcomes to transformation. The judges are also looking for strong stories around collaboration, how you used the unique advantage of WPP – its convening power, its breadth and depth across capabilities – to drive better results for your client. 
You can enter this category independently – the first round judges will also have an opportunity to move work entered in a different category into this one if they feel it meets the criteria above.